Holly Wren Spaulding is an author, interdisciplinary artist, and writing teacher based in southern Maine, where she is the founder and artistic director of Poetry Forge, an online school for poets and secret poets.
Her poetry collections include Between Us (2022), Familiars (2020), If August (2017), Pilgrim (2014), all published by Alice Greene & Company, and The Grass Impossibly (2008), for which she was awarded the Michigan Cooperative Press Chapbook Award in Poetry, selected by Fleda Brown. St. Brigid Press recently released her limited edition, letterpress chapbook called Fire. Her writing also appears in anthologies including Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction, edited by Anne-Marie Oomen (Wayne State University Press, 2019), and We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (Verso, 2006). In 2022 she created Open Field Editions to publish Prima Materia, a limited edition booklet documenting her installation and performance work with visual artist, Karen Dolmanisth. www.hollywrenspaulding.com
To touch /the upper / branches
– from FAMILIARS, 2020
Influences
Improvisation. Listening. Open water. White paper and black ink. Flowers and roadside weeds. Walking. Early printing techniques. Rock climbing and backpacking. Incantation. The body in the world, feeling and noticing. Public libraries. The art of resistance. Circles. Train rides. Making fire. Letters. The language of trees. Autonomous zones. Darkness. Privacy. White pine woods and hot sand. Reverence. The commons. The companionship of books. Night skies. Museums and public parks. Letterpress. Traveling alone. Hand work. Intuition. Mornings. Unseen forces. Picnics. Everyday rituals and ceremonies. Light streaming through. Sleeping with the windows open. Countless writers, composers, dancers, choreographers, photographers, painters, revolutionaries, musicians, filmmakers, community organizers, journalists, gardeners, and conservationists across time. The ocean. The sky.
Recent Collaborations & Performances
Prima Materia (with Karen Dolmanisth, 2019); Still, Inviolate Center (with Karen Dolmanisth, 2018); Each Little Thing (with Karen Dolmanisth, 2017); Lost Lexicon (with William Muller, 2017); Dawn Cento (with Antler Editions); Broken Broadside: The Killing Goes On (with Expedition Press, 2017); Urban Renga (with The Illuminator, 2016); Here, Stands (with Melanie Mowinski, 2015); Chaotic Harmony (with Anne-Marie Oomen, 2011); American Document (Directed by Gretchen Eichberger, 2010).
Holly was a founding member of LORE, a collective of women artists based in northern Michigan who created multi-media performance projects from 2008-2012.
Teaching & Education
Holly was educated at Trinity College, in Dublin, Ireland where she earned a Master of Philosophy with a focus on Poetry and Publishing, and at the University of Michigan, where she majored in Creative Writing and Arts and Ideas in the Humanities, and at Interlochen Arts Academy. Her many awards include recognitions for her poems, essays, teaching, and activism include nominations for Pushcart Prizes, five Hopewood Awards, a Best of the Net award, and Northern Ireland’s Cúchulainn to Kavanaugh Award for Poetry. Holly is the founder of Poetry Forge where she offers workshops and a manuscript support to emerging writers. A member of the faculty at Interlochen College of Creative Arts, she also travels as a teaching artist and serves as guest faculty at arts institutions around the United States.
"We've been searching for eons for the lines to complete Sappho's fragments, and I think we've found them in Holly Wren Spaulding's If August. She has curated a new experience for our rushed lives by offering a well- paced mediation on what life has to offer. Even taking in the lines at their measured pace, we feel invigorated, as if 'a wind/ fell through/ everything' and, admittedly, I for one couldn't help myself: 'I listened/ kept listening' to every syllable with which she offered this enchanting surprise. It's a rare gift to find healing in a book with all of the chatter in our daily lives, but this work will center you."
— A. Van Jordan, author, The Cineaste