Featured Poet

Tiny Seed’s Seasonal Celebration of Inspiring Poets!

With each new season, Tiny Seed will highlight a poet who transcends the power of the word and intertwines their craft by honoring nature.

On each new moon and full moon, our featured poet will be highlighted in the journal (blog), sharing their work in a celebration for our nature-loving community.

Winter/Spring 2023 Featured Poet

Alice B Fogel

Alice B Fogel served as the New Hampshire poet laureate from 2104 through 2019. Her latest book is Nothing But: a series of indirect considerations on art & consciousness. A Doubtful House is her previous collection, preceded by Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” which won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature & the 2016 NH Literary Award in Poetry. An earlier book, Be That Empty, was a national poetry bestseller. She is also the author of Strange Terrain, on how to appreciate poetry without necessarily “getting” it—which offers inroads to poetry useful for readers, reading groups, teachers, & writers. Nominated for Best of the Web & a dozen times for the Pushcart, she has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, & her poems have appeared in many journals & anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Spillway, Hotel Amerika, The Inflectionist, & The Southern Review. She works one-on-one with students with learning differences at Landmark College, & hikes mountains whenever possible.

Website: www.alicebfogel.com

Link/s to book sales:

http://spuytenduyvil.net/nothing-but.html

Nothing But reveals the disruptions—welcome or unsettling—to our stream of consciousness that occur when we encounter the unexplainable. In these poems, such suspensions of linear thought become a beckoning toward transcendence, an opening both deeper into, and out beyond, our perceptions in an otherwise prescribed world.

https://bauhanpublishing.com/shop/a-doubtful-house/

A marriage houses two wildly distinct entities, each one in turn a form containing its own unruly spirit. Addressing its inhabitants with humor, love, sorrow, anger, confusion, and hope, A Doubtful House explores what happens to boundaries–psychological, emotional, physical, even syntactical–when people live together for a long time.

https://schaffnerpress.com/books/interval/

This series of poems responding to Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” pays homage to a 274-year-old masterpiece and, with the theme of spirit and embodiment that music—and life itself—evoke, renders from it a luminous new interpretation. Bach created the Goldbergs’ 32 sections using nearly all the styles of western European music at the time; Fogel responds in kind with a range of contemporary poetic styles, including narrative, lyric, and experimental, all confined within the 32-line structure she has borrowed from the composer’s 32-bar format. Interval mimics the “baroque” effects of overlapping melodies and harmonies by layering sound, syntax, and sense in multiple voices exploring self, identity, and being.

SUMMER/FALL 2021 Featured Poet

Alicia Hayden

I am an award-winning poet and artist from North Yorkshire, with a degree in Biology from Oxford University, and a love of wildlife and the natural world.

I think it is important to use creative writing and the arts to showcase the beauty of nature, and why we need to protect it; and this inspired me to create and self-publish my first, illustrated wildlife poetry book “Rain before Rainbows” in 2020, of which 50% of profits go to the wildlife hospital Tiggywinkles.

My poem “Leopard” won WWF’s My True Nature under 18s poetry competition in 2011, and my poem “Vulnerable to Extinction” won Prickles & Paws’ poetry competition of the same name in 2021. I was awarded the inaugural Ingrid Beazley Award for winning the Human Impact category in David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation’s Wildlife Artist of the Year 2021, for my piece “When the Whale Sang”, which accompanies my poem “The Whale’s Song”.

Links to social media/website:

Website: https://aliciahaydenwildlifephotography.zenfolio.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aliciahaydenwildlife/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aliciahaydenwildlife

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNn7n53grSoMi7cK68_58JQ

Ko-Fi (buy me a coffee): https://ko-fi.com/aliciahayden

Links to book sales:

Shop: https://aliciahaydenshop.bigcartel.com/

Books are also available to buy through The Little Ripon Bookshop, Ripon (UK): https://www.littleriponbookshop.co.uk/

SPRING 2021 Featured Poet

Chris La Tray

Chris La Tray is a Métis writer and storyteller. His first book, One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays From the World At Large (2018, Riverfeet Press) won the 2018 Montana Book Award and a 2019 High Plains Book Award. His next book, Becoming Little Shell, will be published by Milkweed Editions in Spring 2022. Chris is an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians and lives near Missoula, Montana.

WEBSITE/SOCIAL MEDIA

http://www.chrislatray.com

http://www.twitter.com/chrislatray

http://www.instagram.com/metischris

BLOG

An Irritable Métis: chrislatray.substack.com/

BOOK

One-Sentence Journal:

Short Poems and Essays From the World At Large

by Chris La Tray

WINNER: 2018 MONTANA BOOK AWARD!

WINNER: 2019 HIGH PLAINS BOOK AWARD!

Winter 2020 Featured Poet

2020 Tiny Seed Press Chapbook Winner:
Tabitha van der Lee

This Beauty Has No Language by Tabitha van der Lee published by Tiny Seed Press is now available. 10% of the book’s proceeds are donated to the Rodale Institute. The Rodale Institute leads the way in organic agriculture research.

Tabitha van der Lee’s poetry is as if she found one of the hidden pencils tucked away in the tree limbs of Mary Oliver’s heart.

As Rumi reminds us: there is a beauty that has no language. Tabitha van der Lee’s writing means looking for this beauty. It means entering the place where life leaps into our awareness in all its richness and subtlety; the place where we can find hidden patterns and meaning in all of our being human; the place where we can touch the everness of life. Through her poetry, van der Lee helps us all find words for this beauty that has no language.

This Beauty Has No Language, is a collection of thirty-three poems from Tiny Seed Press Chapbook winner, Tabitha van der Lee. Lee’s poems reflect on the beauty and depth of nature and our relationship to it – both within and outside ourselves. The book is adorned with hand-drawn illustrations by Netherland based artist Maartje van den Noort. A perfect companion book for any nature-lover looking to pause and appreciate the natural world, and dive deeper into the heartfelt connection nature provides to our inner landscape.

”van der Lee’s words remind us how intimately we are connected to nature, from the soil to the sky. It is a unique privilege to reflect on the duty we have to protect our own well-being and the natural world through her poetry.” – Rodale Institute

This Beauty Has No Language is available for purchase at https://tinyseedjournal.com/bookshop/

This Beauty Has No Language – Book Launch

Tabitha van der Lee is a mom of two children, living in the Netherlands with her beloved of the past two decades. She has always been fascinated by the ways we are touched by life and grow from experience. “We are – as life is – forever becoming.” Writing to her is a way of looking – always looking – at this becoming. To ponder it, be amazed by it, and take part in it. www.tabithavanderlee.com

Autumn 2020 Featured Poet:
Michelle Sylliboy (Mi’kmaq/L’nu)

Michelle Sylliboy (Mi’kmaq/L’nu)

Award winning author and Interdisciplinary artist Michelle Sylliboy (Mi’kmaq/L’nu) was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised on her traditional L’nuk territory in We’koqmaq, Cape Breton. While living on the traditional, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, Sylliboy completed a BFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and a Masters in Education from Simon Fraser University. She is currently a PhD candidate in Simon Fraser University’s Philosophy of Education program, where she is working to reclaim her original written komqwej’wikasikl language. Her collection of photography and L’nuk hieroglyphic poetry, Kiskajeyi—I Am Ready, was published by Rebel Mountain Press in 2019.

Michelle Sylliboy’s Website

Winner of the 2020 Indigenous Voices Award (IVAs) in the category of Published Poetry (English category).