Holly J. Hughes is coauthor of The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, editor of the award-winning anthology Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, and author of Boxing the Compass. Hughes teaches writing at Edmonds Community College in Washington state. She has spent over thirty summers working on the water in Alaska in a variety of roles, including commercial fishing for salmon, skippering a 65-foot schooner, and working as a naturalist on ships.

Other poems by Holly J. Hughes in Verse Daily:
October 20, 2007:   "Steering by Monarchs" " Fog thick enough to lick, horizon a blanket..."

Books by Holly J. Hughes:

Holly J. Hughes's Website.

About Sailing by Ravens:

"Hughes’s gift to us is a poet’s interior map taken from her experience as a navigator, plus extensive reading about the sea. According to Rilke, art must bear witness to a great solitude, and Hughes reveals the compass points of a searching heart plunged into a solitude whose terms are nothing less than to agree to being lost, to drift, and, as in the title, to learn to trust the instincts of birds. To accompany Hughes’s reveries is to experience a venturing soul whose arrival replicates the fearful exuberance of freedom; her discovery is that without such freedom, we cannot delineate the boundaries of our inner survival maps."
—Tess Gallagher

"In Sailing by Ravens the language of navigation, horizons, and knots begins not as metaphorical flourish but from a literal, deeply realized seagoing life. Holly Hughes has found all her compass points in mapping this world with great intelligence, compassion, and meaning."
—Nancy Lord