Jan Zlotnik Schmidt's poetry chapbook brings new light to the complicated life of Bess Houdini and gives voice to this stunning and admirable woman. Jan is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita at SUNY New Paltz in the Department of English where she taught autobiography, creative writing, American and contemporary literature, women’s Literature, and Holocaust literature courses. Her work has been published in many journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Broadkill Review, Cream City Review, Home Planet News, Kansas Quarterly, Memoir (and), Vassar Review, and Westchester Review. Her work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize Series. She has had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000) and two collections of autobiographical essays, Women/Writing/Teaching (SUNY Press, 1998) and Wise Women: Reflections of Teachers at Mid-Life, coauthored with Dr. Phyllis R. Freeman (Routledge, 2000). In addition, she coauthored with Laurence Carr an anthology of women’s writing from the Hudson Valley: A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill, 2013), which won the USA Best Book Award for an anthology. One chapbook, The Earth Was Still, was recently published by Finishing Line Press and another, Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time, was published by Word Temple Press. Legacies: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, a composition and literature textbook and anthology, coauthored with Lynne Crockett and published by Cengage is now in its fifth edition. Her full-length volume, Foraging for Light, was published in September 2019 by Finishing Line Press.
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