Silk Purses and Lemonade

Elizabeth Robin retired to Hilton Head Island after a 33-year career as a high school teacher to devote herself to writing. She has two chapbooks through Finishing Line Press: Where Green Meets Blue (2018), an homage to her late husband and new Lowcountry home; and Silk Purses and Lemonade (2017), a story that finds hope inside a tangle of grief. In 2021 she won the Carrie McCray Nickens Fellowship from the South Carolina Writers Association and the John Edward Johnson Prize from the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Robin emcees a monthly open mic and partners with arts groups to bring literary programs to Hilton Head Island.To My Dreamcatcher, Robin's first full-length collection, begins with a bird's journey and winds through encounters with ghosts and dreamcatchers, trees and rushing falls, to a spiritual place inside a painting, the moon, a national park. As she travels through her past in the title poem, "To My Dreamcatcher," an elegy to her late husband, she moves from margins to the page's middle, and finds a comfortable place in which to tell her story. Within such spaces, Robin tackles the challenge: as a woman alone, finishing life well.As a poet of witness and discovery, Robin cannot resist raising up the stories of those pushed into the margins. To My Dreamcatcher begins with the world of workers, kittens, the isolated and starving, and travels from this bleakness into a place of joy and possibility, a place where we learn the lessons of trees and clouds and moons and the sound of water.More at: http://www.elizabethrobin.com