ABOUT PAULETTA
Poet, Memoirist, Teacher and Editor Pauletta Hansel is author of ten poetry collections including Will There Also Be Singing? released in 2024 by Shadelandhouse Modern Press. Poet and teacher Jeremy Paden says, “Pauletta Hansel’s Will There Be Singing? could be subtitled, Found Poems, Centos, and Other Songs Woven from the World Around Us. In this collection of poems, the Former (and First) Poet Laureate of Cincinnati writes a poetry of witness that is also a masterclass on how to work with collage. Much like the Kentucky artist Robert Morgan, whose sculptures are made from an accretion of found objects, Hansel takes news clippings and historical essays, poems and social media posts, and places them next to each other and layers them on top of each other until a poem emerges.”
Heartbreak Tree, released in 2022 by Madville Publishing is a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia. It is winner of the Poetry Society of Virginia‘s 2023 North American Book Award. An interview in Salon.com about the book can be found here. Read three poems from the collection published in Still: The Journal here and via links below. Reviews of the collection can be found here and here.
Pauletta was the 2022 Writer-in- Residence for the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library. She served as the first Poet Laureate of Cincinnati from April 2016 through March 2018.
Other recent books include Friend (Dos Madres Press, 2020), Coal Town Photograph (Dos Madres Press, 2019) and Palindrome (Dos Madres Press, 2017), which was awarded the prestigious Weatherford Award for the best Appalachian poetry book of 2017. Read her blogs about the writing of Palindrome here. Read poet Linda Parson’s review in Still The Journal here.
Previous books are Tangle (Dos Madres Press, 2015), The Lives We Live in Houses (Wind Publications, 2011) and What I Did There (Dos Madres Press, 2011). Pauletta’s poetry and prose has been featured recently in journals including Oxford American, One (Jacar Press), New Verse News, JukeJoint, Change Seven, The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, The Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Northern Appalachian Review, Heartwood Literary Magazine, Sheila-na-Gig, Persimmon, Hong Kong Review, Thimble, Psaltery and Lyre, Molecule, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, Main Street Rag, Literary Accents, PoetrySouth, Talisman, Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine, Atlanta Review, ABZ Journal, Postcard Poems and Prose, Still: The Journal, The Mom Egg, and Appalachian Journal and anthologized in Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice; Feminine Rising; A Gathering at the Forks; Old Wounds, New Words; A Kentucky Christmas; Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia; the Motif series and Creatures of Habitat and Crossing Lines. Her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and Verse Daily. Links to several poems and prose published online can be found here.
Pauletta leads community writing workshops and retreats in the Greater Cincinnati area and beyond. She is past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. (Submission guidelines here.) Pauletta also served as Writer in Residence at Thomas More College’s Creative Writing Vision Program and at WordPlay, a literary and literacy organization for younger writers. Pauletta received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Originally from southeastern Kentucky, Pauletta lives in Cincinnati with her husband, Owen Cramer.
Author Photo by By Kentucky Rose Photography
Pauletta Hansel 