Description: A 1994 trip to Syria and Jordan as an Arts America Speaker for the United States Information Agency began the group of poems for The Collector of Bodies. The manuscript stayed in a file until the Civil War began in Syria, March 18, 2011, the author's 70th birthday. The poems were retrieved, and the manuscript continued.
Brief description: Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. Her 2014-15 books are Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education, University of Nebraska Press (creative nonfiction), Report to the Department of the Interior, University of New Mexico Press (poetry), and three novels, Uprising of Goats (the voices of 10 Biblical women), One of Us (the church a murderer left in his wake), and Ironic Witness (a minister's wife finds herself in hell). Among her awards are two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Minnesota Book Award, and an American Book Award.
Review Quotes: ""To trace the complexities of being an alien in a foreign country and to also consider the strange intimacy of the story we all inhabit: this is what Diane Glancy asks us to do. She attends to this fractured, uneasy, impossible balance, moving between the Middle East and her own story, and rises up to the Divine the question of what to do in the face of unbearable human brutality and human tenderness."" --Anne M. Doe Overstreet, author of Delicate Machinery Suspended