Laurie Allmann is a Minnesota-based essayist and poet who writes on themes related to the natural world. She received a Minnesota Book Award for her creative nonfiction book, Far from Tame: Reflections from the Heart of a Continent (University of MN Press); and a MIPA award from the Midwest Independent Publishers Association for her collection of poetry, An Hour from Now (Nodin Press). Her essays have been featured in public radio commentaries on MPR and KFAI, and published in numerous anthologies. She has been a course instructor for the Loft Literary Center and is a founding co-editor of Agate magazine.

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The author has collected an assortment of poems and prose pieces drawn from several phases of his life. Some offer personal reflections on both childhood and recent family occurrences. Here bird songs and political events in Belfast rub shoulders, ducks on a pond and rainy days in the mountains. Embracing silence and playing with family pets. A second section contains a collection of incidental "there and then" and "here and now" poems, merging childhood reflections of scary places, visiting relatives, and receiving gifts with adult reconsiderations of those and other remembered times. The final section is an "in memorium" of sorts, containing a chronological journal of laments on the death of the author's wife and grandson, reflections on being a widower, and the joys of learning to dance again in the midst of grief.

The poetry is casual, unforced, sometime almost stream-of-consciousness. An element of curiosity and openness surfaces repeatedly, and also a sensitivity to those zones of life that are likely to remain mysterious. In one poem a casual description of car repairs leads to insights about how to realign aspects of the poet's own daily routines, including such advice as "put more miles in your life, not in your car." The entire collection, in fact, might be described as an effort to appreciate both life's straight and narrow roads and also the curves, intersections, other drivers.

Ted Bowman grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He moved to Minnesota in 1977. He has been a grief and family educator for more than fifty years, and has spoken to many groups throughout Minnesota, the United States, and other countries. Ted has taught at the University of Minnesotan, Saint Thomas, and United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Ambiguous Parables: Poems and Prose of Loss and Renewal (Nodin Press: 2021. Ted is the father and stepfather of four children and a grandfather of five “grand” children, four alive and one dead but alive in memory and love. His wife, Marge, died in July 2020.

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