Poet Laureate 2009
Doris FerIeger, Ph.D.
Doris Ferleger, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and poet whose poetry and memoir essays have been published in numerous literary journals including: Bridges, California Quarterly, Calyx, Comstock Review, Confluence, Many Mountains Moving, Northeast Corridor, Phoebe (Suny), South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, 13th Moon, and in anthologies entitled: Motherpoet and Journey into Motherhood. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College and has attended well-regarded writers conferences including Bread Loaf and the Krakow Polish Poetry Seminar, founded by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, which brought established and emerging American poets to Poland to discuss Polish poetry and the interface between poetry and history. Ferleger’s ardent interest in poetry and history is reflected in her book entitled Big Silences in a Year of Rain. Of Ferleger’s book, poet Bill Olsen writes:
Bonhoffer wrote of grace that “it is only when one loves life and the world so much that without them everything would be gone, that one can believe in…a new world.” That new world, in all its astonishing difficulties and almost unlovable vastness, is, I think, the subject proper of Doris Ferleger’s exceptional manuscript Big Silences in a Year of Rain. The poetry has a rough music, but it never slouches, it glides, and away from Bethlehem, away from pretty ideals; and it exists in and for this world, always. These poems about Jewishness lost and found and about parentage from both ends of experience are lived inside with an intensity that is extremely rare, and with such joy in the medium, resoundingly celebratory of the invisible yet somehow palpable powers of poetry.