Stephanie Dickinson raised on an Iowa farm now lives in New York City. Her novels Half Girl and Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil, as is her feminist noir Love Highway. Other books include Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg (New Michigan Press), Flashlight Girls Run (New Meridian Arts Press), and The Emily Fables. She received distinguished story citations in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays and numerous Pushcart anthology citations. Her stories have been reprinted in New Stories from the South, New Stories from the Midwest, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. In 2020 she won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Award and in 2021 TBOP brought out Blue Swan/Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries. Along with Rob Cook, she edits Rain Mountain Press.

Books by Stephanie Dickinson:

Other poems on the web by Stephanie Dickinson:
Two poems

Stephanie Dickinson's Website.

About Blue Swan, Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries:

"Poetry. War, mental illness, narcotics, sickness, incest and a deep passion for poetry were all a part of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl's short and tragic life (1887-1914). Biographical accounts have been few, vague and speculative. So little is clearly known about the man that much in this regard has been supplanted by what can be only assumed from the poet's substantial volume of work. The great German poet, Else-Lasker Schuler, who was a friend of the poet, wrote in her two line elegy: 'Georg Trakl died by his own hand in the war. / That was how lonely he was in the world. I loved him.' In BLUE SWAN, BLACK SWAN: THE TRAKL DIARIES, Stephanie Dickinson opens a new door, but not one into Trakl's psyche, rather from out of his psyche as if it were him relaying the incidents as they occurred in each particular moment and which these poems more than aptly provide. All is as if it originates from his mouth, from his dictation onto the pages of what is meant to be read as his unwritten diary. So powerful and precise is Dickinson's language that at times you cannot distinguish between what she says and what you imagine Trakl would have said. The intensity level is that analagous. Dickinson's intimacy with such a tragic poet's life acts to offer us Trakl himself speaking about something we never knew in such detail and which we the reader have only her to thank for sharing with us."
—Paul B. Roth