Laura Hope-Gill, Director.

Bio

Laura Hope-Gill is a deaf writer and painter. Her work appears in 13th Moon, Bayou, Briar Cliff Review, Cape Rock, Carquinez Poetry Review, Chattahoochee Review, Cincinnati Review, Cold Mountain Review, Diagram, Denver Quarterly, Hampden-Sydney Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Illuminations, Laurel Review, Madison Review, Mindprints, North Carolina Literary Review, Parabola, Phantasmagoria, Poet Lore, Primavera, Owen Wister Review, Rivendell, Sortes,  South Carolina Review, Spillway, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Xavier Review, and other journals. Her poem “The Dimension of Dog” was nominated by Denver Quarterly for the 2022 Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College, and is the founding director of the MFA program at Lenoir-Rhyne University. She founded the multicultural poetry festival Asheville Wordfest and was named the first poet laureate of the Blue Ridge Parkway. She has published several books, including co-authoring Look Up Asheville: An Architectural Journey Vol. 1 (2010) and Look Up Asheville Collection II (2011) by the Grateful Steps Foundation. Her memoir of her deafness, Deaf Sea Scrolls, will be published by Pisgah Press in 2022. She enjoys playing the piano, dog sitting, and sailing.

Rather than present a land acknowledgment, I wish to instead acknowledge the actions of my ancestors a great many of which are responsible for the content of the land acknowledgment. I am descended from the Plantagenet lines, the very people who created and drove human enslavement for centuries. Some of these Royals are Stuart Kings, James I and II. I am also descended from a Suffrage Activist in Belfast, Northern Ireland, who was also (story goes) the first woman in Belfast to wear trousers and ride a bike. A symphony violinist, my great-grandfather, chose to leave in 1917. My grandmother was a child at the time and always remembered the vibrations of the ship when a torpedo barely missed. I am quite sure my spiritual and creative activism work as well stems from both of these lines, the state and the art. When I see “heritage” used a reason to be cruel, I am often tempted to reply with my “heritage,” the source of so much torment, torture, and death. At its deepest, my heritage, like all heritages, connects somehow to indigeniety, and it is to the values of indigeneity that I strive. Among these, noted by Alastair McIntosh, are mutuality, reciprocity, and generosity.

I am a mother to a 20 year old Creative Writing major, clearly my greatest blessing. I coordinate the MFA in Creative Writing and Narrative Health Certificate Programs at Lenoir-Rhyne University where I serve as a tenured, Distinguished Associate Professor. My path to this blessed post includes a village school in Jamaica, a Basic Education and GED portable at the edge of Olympic National Park in Port Angeles, WA, a jail, a juvee, a prison, a boarding school for boys, UNCA, AB-Tech, and an assortment of workshops and readings in interesting spaces including The Green Door, the Arboretum, a bar in Chicago, an airport lounge during a delay, and a classroom in Zhuang-he, China.

I am a Dogsitter with more than 300 five-star reviews on Rover, and I am a painter with twice as many sales of my work than Van Gogh, meaning 2. In 2007, I left my teaching position at Christ School then wrote a book of poems, The Soul Tree. The collection led to my current post at Lenoir-Rhyne through a series of remarkable events several of which I will never understand.

I am deaf and very slowly working through a traumatic brain injury from November. The vision presented in this website is the result of that brain injury, for it led to my spending months alone with no light through winter.

Such conditions are sure to drive some deep reflection and send one back into the world with an idea.