A Washington DC native, Wendell Hawken (she/her) came to poetry late in life and earned her MFA in Poetry at the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers, decades after her BA degree. Her publications include three chapbooks and four full collections: The Luck of Being (2008), White Bird (2017) a sequence about her husband’s battle with cancer, Stride for Stride: A Country Life (2020), After Ward (2022), and All About (January 2023). Hawken lives on a grass farm in the northern Shenandoah Valley where the first meaning of AI is Artificial Insemination. Two dogs keep her company.