Brief description: Abby is a writer and teacher from Denver, Colorado. She is the wife to an art educator and mother to two passionate young children. She received her bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College in Latin American Studies and Spanish and an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. She is excited to be part of the Finishing Line Press family. When not writing Abby loves to dance, play soccer and swim. Her other work includes various publications in such journals as McSweeneys, Calyx, RATTLE, Pilgrimage, The Mom Egg Review and a chapbook, An Avocado Slowly Falling published by Dancing Girl Press. Abby was the recipient of the 2011 Lighthouse Writers Seven Deadly Sins Writing Contest, the 2012 Sixfold Writers contest prize for poetry and a finalist in the Blast Furnace Chapbook competition. She was also nominated to read at City Council as part of the Imagine 2020 city wide plan. You can visit her at fromtheblowtorch.wixsite.com/abbytempleton-greene
Review Quotes:
Prayer from a Magdalena Jail Cell endeavors to map out lyrically the passage through grief--to give lines and demarcations, borders and sense, to the timeless, placelessness of tragedy. And as we follow these scars cut across the earth, these highway markings and crosses stabbed in the sand, we also traverse the veins of a body, a family, a self--the life left behind. In stark and bodily language, Templeton-Greene captures the visceral nature of loss, the wound ripped into the cloth, at the same time giving space to the possibility of renewal, to the power to reweave, remake, continue.
Courtney E. Morgan,
Author of The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman
The poems in Abby Templeton-Greene's Prayer from a Magdalena Jail Cell dare to look tragedy and loss in the face-- "Our car rolled seven times that day, / the desert sun cascading/ through windshield's broken ribcage" or "[there is] a patch/ of scalp missing where/ we tried to scoop your brains/ back in"--to find the things that make us human. There is grief in these poems, to be sure, but this collection is truly a prayer for us all, a reminder of "the goddamn magic of being alive."
Lauren Marie Schmidt,
Author of Filthy Labors (Northwestern University Press)