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Priscilla Long

Priscilla Long
Photo by Jerry Jaz

Priscilla's Website

Nov 20, 2020, 6:00pm. Poetry in Technicolor, Sierra Nelson and Priscilla Long in poetry and in conversation. (via Zoom; registration required) Sponsored by Elliot Bay Book Company.

Priscilla Long is a Seattle based poet, writer, editor, and a longtime independent teacher of writing. She writes science, poetry, history, creative nonfiction, and fiction. She is author of six books (to date), including the how-to-write manual The Writer’s Portable Mentor. Her work appears in numerous literary publications, both print and online, and her science column “Science Frictions” ran for 92 weeks online at The American Scholar . She has a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Washington and serves as founding and consulting editor of HistoryLink.org , the free online encyclopedia of Washington state history.

Of her writing, the novelist Laura Kalpakian said, “She won’t be confined by forms. This is what made her recent Fire and Stone such a protean, exciting book. Yes, it’s a vivid memoir, but she also asks questions of The Past, not simply her own, but the larger anthropological past. Priscilla Long is the enemy of slack thinking, the lazy, the euphemistic. She has a Renaissance mind ...”

Priscilla Long grew up on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

[Excerpted from Bethany Reid, Long, Priscilla (b. 1943), HistoryLink.org, the free online encyclopedia of Washington State history (https://www.historylink.org/File/20845)]


T. Clear reading from A House, Undone

Featuring Priscilla Long


Holy Magic: $16.00

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"Abstraction" from Holy Magic was featured on Verse Daily.

Read a review of Holy Magic by Bethany Reid.

Read a review of Holy Magic by Kathleen Kirk.

Read a review of Holy Magic by Michael Daley in The Raven Chronicles.

Read a review of Holy Magic by Pamela Hobart Carter in The Seattle Star.

Listen to Priscilla talk about Holy Magic and more in a chat with Paul Nelson.

Podcast featuring Holy Magic Writers Radio


Poem from Holy Magic

The Yellowwood Wood

After Allen Grossman

The poet spells yellow:
a yellowwood wood, a yellow-
wood bench to loaf upon. My poem
purloins his lines:  leonine death-
gold of Autumn. Of the great cats,
only cheetahs purr. In this yellow-
wood wood, truth dallies,
deliquescent. Luteus leaves
twirl down like birds. Death
will get its winter day.
Our yellowed pages stay.
Let the world go dun
and orange, or rot
in blots of blue, or burn.
I’ll loiter here.