Carole Simmons Oles is a professor of English at California State University at Chico. She is the author of a number of books, including Night Watches: Inventions on the Life of Maria Mitchell, Stunts, and Sympathetic Systems. Among her honors are a Poetry Society of America Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and four Prairie Schooner Awards.

About Waking Stone:

"How often is a book of poems simultaneously inspiring, informative, fun, solid as marble, sensuous as flesh, tough-minded and downright beautiful? Waking Stone is all those things. It gives us the purpose-driven life of the sculptor Harriet Hosmer splendidly ventriloquized by the poet Carafe Simmons Oles. When I started, I couldn't stop the force of these poems blew me away. I am filled with admiration for the sculptor and the poet—two `women with sharp instruments' in the service of their art."
—Alicia Ostriker

"‘In this astounding and flawlessly structured book Oles has entered into a passionate dialogue with ... Hosmer.... She does this by ironically getting out of the self and exploring a world where a complex of voices counterpoint, support, and compete throughout this marvelously operatic work set against a background from the United States to Rome, and including a cast of characters ranging from Thomas Hart Benton to the Brownings to Papal scandals.... We are left in the end with a hauntingly compelling vision of a life and times that Oles has rediscovered as our own life and times."
—Richard Jackson

"Oles has deftly, clearly, resolutely brought to light the story of this 19th century woman artist who took possession of her own life with a determination remarkable in her own era but rare at any time. Oles' style echoes her subject: the poems are at once clear and suggestive, a narrative composed of glimpses, a duet between the 19th century woman and her 21st century celebrant.... It is a tribute to Oles' art that she faces so much, so quietly, in this dignified book."
—Rosanna Warren