About Lola Haskins
Lola Haskins is available for readings, workshops, and consulting. For rate information, please contact her.
Ms. Haskins’ most recent collection, Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (Pitt, 2019) was featured in The New York Times Sunday magazine. Previous to that was How Small, Confronting Morning (Jacar, 2016) , set in the woods and waters of North central Floride. The two before that, The Grace to Leave (Anhinga, 2012), and Still, the Mountain (Paper Kite, 2010), won Florida Book Awards. Her in-print books of poems are Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2004), Extranjera (Story Line, 1998), and The Rim Benders (Anhinga, 2001). The books before these, Hunger (University of Iowa Press, 1993– winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize), Forty-Four Ambitions for the Piano (University Press of Florida, 1990), Castings (Countryman Press, 1984), and Planting the Children, (University Press of Florida, 1983), are out of print but can be ordered from this web site. Across Her Broad Lap Something Wonderful (State Street) and Solutions Beginning with A, fables about women, illustrated by Maggie Taylor (Modernbook) are unavailable.
Ms. Haskins’ prose writings include Fifteen Florida Cemeteries, Strange Tales Unearthed (University Press of Florida, 2011) and an advice book for people interested in poetry, Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner’s Guide to the Poetic Life (Backwaters, 2007). is now available from the University of Nebraska Press.
The past ten or fifteen years have seen ventures into the natural world. A first effort, an essay introducing a book of photographs, Visions of Florida was followed by an essay in The Wild Heart of Florida (proceeds to Nature Conservancy), both from the University Press of Florida. Her poem “Prayer for the Everglades” ends the otherwise prose The Book of the Everglades (Milkweed) and another “The View from Cedar Key” is one of two poems in a book of citizens’ responses to the Gulf, given to all state legislators prior to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Ms. Haskins has also written an as-yet unpublished collection of personal essays beginning in Florida state parks, called Wind, the Grass, and Us. She has served on the executive committee of Florida Defenders of the Environment since 2011.
Ms. Haskins relishes collaboration. Most recently, she and cellist, Ben Noyes, created a CD of poems from The Grace to Leave. Composer Paul Richards (UF Department of Music) has just issued a two CD set of all forty-four of her ambitions for the piano for voice and piano. Composer Willis Bodine’s settings for choir and hand bells of 11 of her nature poems concluded UF’s 2012 Choral Music Festival. She has collaborated on a number of occasions with visual artists, most recently with collagist Derek Gores. Her most recent dance piece was Land of La Chua, premiered at UF’s Performing Arts Center by Dance Alive! in Spring of 2019 with choreography by Judy Skinner. Favorite past ventures with Dance Alive! include two collaborations, also at the Performing Arts Center: in the first she played the speaking Mata Hari, a part she wrote for a ballet of that title; the second featured four of her poems, each inspired by a Cindy Sherman photograph. Among her favorite multimedia pieces was Swan Song, directed by Ani Collier and performed at the Hippodrome State Theater with seven dancers, an actor, and a violinist.