Katherine D. Perry was born in Mobile, Alabama on Christmas Eve, which aptly makes her Capricorn: both goat and fish. She grew up in nearby Spanish Fort where she learned to love fast-moving vehicles, tent camping, white-sand beaches, and the people most of the world counts out. She discovered poetry in elementary school after writing childhood versions of magical realism stories. In poetry, she found ways to express her wild imagination without having to find a plot ending that made the package too tidy or optimistic, and she could indulge her love of sound and music. She filled notebooks with trite and rhyming metaphors about growing up in a racist and sexist world and slid them between her mattresses so that no one would ask her to explain what they meant. It wasn't until high school that she took a creative writing class and shared her poetry with other people. Perhaps not all poets are introverts, but Katherine fits the stereotype. After too-many years of undergraduate classes, she majored in English in spite of everyone's questions about what she would do with her life. She published her first poems in her student literary magazine, graduated, and moved into graduate school. While working on her Ph.D. in American women's poetry at Auburn University, she began working with the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project for which she taught poetry and reading classes. These classes shaped her understanding of the transformative nature of art and poetry, and they ignited in her a motivation to combine her privileged academic work with activism. She is now a tenured associate professor of English, and she is one of the founding coordinators of the Georgia State University Prison Education Project. Teaching both in a community college and in state and federal prisons, she believes that arts and education have the power to change, heal, and inspire students from all backgrounds. Depending on point of view, fifty years can either be a long or a short time. Still, with that particular birthday on the horizon, Katherine has lately been evaluating what we are capable of doing in a single lifetime. She finds the summation of a life in a single page to be difficult, especially a life that is only half completed. But, if you were able to meet her in a bar, under dim lights and a few beverages, she might tell you: she loves to walk silently in the mountains and to commune with the trees in the tradition of what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku (forest bathing); she is committed to a yoga practice and to the Girl Scout motto: always be prepared. She adores William Faulkner's and Toni Morrison's sentences and insights. She has made more mistakes than triumphs, but she believes mistakes to be the most important and most beautiful parts of human evolution. This book is a collection of the dizzying crashes between a search for beauty and a will to acknowledge the difficulties of the human journey. Most of all, she hopes that you will find something here that inspires you to help us all to move forward. Be persistent, but swim on.
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