Juditha Dowd

Cool Women is a critique group of eight women who have been performing their poems together for seven years. At estrogen-drenched poetry readings in venues from New Jersey and Pennsylvania to Oregon and in three volumes of poems, they have explored the arc of women's lives with depth and humor. Cool Women Collect Themselves presents four rounds of poems with each poet in reply and dialogue with the readers before her. Although each poet has a strong individual voice, Cool Women think of themselves a group in which the communal enriches the personal. The Cool Women lead intense and involved lives. Besides teaching and writing more than 200 years, they have worked as caterers, telemarketers, food stylists, artists' models, and a night bell girl; they have raised families and toiled in advertising, medicine, recruiting and insurance. They have received nine New Jersey State Council on the Arts grants, two Allen Ginsberg awards and one William Carlos Williams Prize. They have been nominated for six Pushcart Prizes and for the National Book Critics award. They have published 26 books, not including the three Cool Women volumes. They have been married 13 times and have 16 children and 16 grandchildren. Above all, they are artists of the written and spoken word.

"What does it mean to sacrifice for someone else's art? Audubon's Sparrow answers this question by way of a verse biography of Lucy Bakewell, the intrepid and largely unsung wife of the artist and naturalist John James Audubon. Set in the early decades of the 19th century, an era of dramatic growth and expansion in America, the book follows Lucy and John James as they fall in love, marry, and set off to make a life on the western frontier. Juditha Dowd weaves together lyric poems, imagined letters, and diary entries in Lucy's voice with excerpts from Audubon's journals and published works (which many believe Lucy helped to write and edit) to offer an intimate exploration of the thoughts of a young wife and mother. Moving from port to port along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, Lucy struggles to square the family's poverty with her husband's desire to abandon business and pursue his passion for nature. In a time when women are rarely permitted to work outside the home, Lucy draws on her education and musical talents to become a teacher, freeing Audubon to travel abroad seeking a publisher for The Birds of America. As she wards off financial ruin, Lucy's natural confidence and independence emerge, along with a very different life from the one she expected. Nimbly written and sympathetically rendered, Audubon's Sparrow is an enchanting blend of research and imagination-an indelible portrait of an American woman in need of rediscovery"--