Carolyn Stoloff

Carolyn Stoloff, a native and lifelong New Yorker, poet, and painter, taught both poetry and studio art at Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York for many years and visited other parts of the country as a guest writer for short periods. She also taught in public schools, a house of detention, and a Quaker-run halfway house for drug addicts.

Teaching left summers free for travel or a combination of work and exploration of the natural world thanks to residential grants in rural environments. She spent several productive periods at the MacDowell Colony, the UCROSS Foundation in Wyoming, the Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico (resulting in a collection of poems about Taos, Swiftly Now), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and other colonies.

Stoloff was awarded a National Council on the Arts Award for achievement and numerous other awards for painting and poetry have come her way.

Over the years, her poems have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry Northwest, Yankee, the Bitter Oleander, and Bomb, to name a few.

Her work has been selected for a number of anthologies; among them are Rising Tides, A Year in Poetry, New Directions, and the New Yorker Book of Poems.

Ms. Stoloff’s previous volumes of poetry include Stepping Out (Unicorn Press), Dying to Survive (Doubleday & Co.), Swiftly Now (Ohio University Press), A Spool of Blue, New and Selected Poems (Scarecrow Press) and You Came to Meet Someone Else (Asylum Arts). Her newest collection of poetry is Reaching for Honey published by Red Hen Press.

Of Reaching for Honey, John Balaban writes, “Through Carolyn Stoloff’s painter’s eyes, a bright swarm of images rushes by us and we are filled with a sense that the world is luminous, spiritually alive, and ready to speak to us. This, her eighth book, is Rilke’s “bee of the invisible’ bringing us its honey.”