About Laura Apol
Laura Apol teaches creative writing and literature in the College of Education at Michigan State University. For more than twenty years, she has led creative writing workshops in local, national and international contexts for writers of all skill levels. Her poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, and she is the author of several collections of her own poems: Falling into Grace; Crossing the Ladder of Sun (winner, Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry); Requiem, Rwanda (finalist, Lascaux Prize in Poetry; drawn from her work using writing to facilitate healing among survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, and translated into Kinyarwanda under the title Emwe N’imvura Irabyibuka [Even the Rain Remembers]); and Celestial Bodies (winner, Overleaf Chapbook Manuscript Competition and finalist, Oklahoma Book Award).In her sixth full-length collection, Cauterized (2024), award-winning poet Laura Apol returns to themes of loss that are, at least partly, cauterized: her struggles with a conservative religious upbringing, her mother’s illness and death, children growing up and leaving home, losing her adult daughter to suicide, a worldwide pandemic, the casualties of age. With startling honesty, empathy, and lyrical precision, Apol offers insight into the ways some wounds need cautery to begin to heal.
Her work has three times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice been nominated for Best of the Net. From 2019-2021 she served as the Lansing-area poet laureate.
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in the story no one smiles, no lesson is learned.
the narrator can not change any one's heart
the story is agate to another story, which opens onto a story after that.
i made it up but the story is true.
