Emilie Lygren
Emilie Lygren (she/her) is a nonbinary poet and educator whose work is grounded in curiosity and reverence. She’s taught writing in a variety of contexts: classrooms, research stations, graduate programs, parks, libraries, and beyond. Emilie calls on her years of experience as an outdoor educator and curriculum developer to help students connect with themselves, one another, and the places they find themselves in. Emilie’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Wayfarer Magazine, and Crab Creek Poetry Review (where her poem was a semifinalist for the Crab Creek Poetry Award). Her first book of poetry, What We Were Born For, won the Blue Light Book award was chosen by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as a monthly book pick from the Poetry Foundation. Emilie is currently an outdoor educator, a professor of creative writing, a poet in the schools, and at work on an anthology of poems on mental health for teens and youth. She lives on Coast Miwok land in San Rafael, California.
poetry
Once I Was a Stone
trade paperback / 6 x 9 / 130pp / 978-1-965320-74-7
Once I was a stone is an intimate portrait of gender nonconformity rooted in the context of childhood and the natural world. With an honest and hopeful tone, Emilie Lygren grapples with the complexities of selfhood, power, and loss, offering insight on our intricate relationship with Earth’s ecosystems.
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"Emilie Lygren's poems are pulse and heartbeat! Their clear vision restores our own bigger sight. Remember when we felt connected to everything? Emilie's poems are gravity, immediate ground, wide horizon, ashes pitched off a cliff, creek stones carried up a mountain. I love their endearing truthfulness, beauty and lack of fear!"
–Naomi Shihab Nye
"These poems imagine what it is to be river, creek, stone, cottonwood. To be in love with “branches, barnacles, and acorns.” Many will find shelter here in Lygren’s moving and personal meditation on being, “a body among bodies” in the natural world."
—Danusha Laméris
"Emilie Lygren sings in the poetic ancestral lineage of Mary Oliver, attuned to the natural world and its intricate wonders while expanding the forest chorus into the fluid undulations of being ungendered. Their poems weave reflections through cottonwoods and alder leaf, poppies and mycelium, the spider’s intricate webbing, the stone breaking itself smooth and speaking as sand. This collection builds a world against the binary, and bends poems like a willow toward the interconnectedness of all."
—Kai Coggin, author of Mother of Other Kingdoms
the poems in Once I Was a Stone invite us into a deeper reckoning with both childhood and identity. Above all, this luminous and masterful new collection ushers us into a world where we can all feel safe and welcome, no matter who we are, or how far we’ve come on our journey. It is hard to put into words just how essential this book feels, or to say how many lives might be saved simply because Emilie chose to share her story with such openness, honesty, and grace."
—James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart and Turning Toward Grief
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