Judith Arcana

Born and raised in the Great Lakes region, Judith Arcana has lived in Oregon since 1995. She writes poems, stories, essays and books, publishing online and on paper. Her writing has, naturally, been influenced by the times and places of her life. A tenured high school teacher in the 1960's, Judith was fired, as many teachers were in those years in the United States, suddenly considered radical by the school's board. She believes her writing is, like that of every writer, seeded by the constant...See more

Born and raised in the Great Lakes region, Judith Arcana has lived in Oregon since 1995. She writes poems, stories, essays and books, publishing online and on paper. Her writing has, naturally, been influenced by the times and places of her life. A tenured high school teacher in the 1960's, Judith was fired, as many teachers were in those years in the United States, suddenly considered radical by the school's board. She believes her writing is, like that of every writer, seeded by the constant interplay of literary impulse and political context, growing through a life of reading and thinking. In this collection, the poems are rooted in her longtime concern with thoughtful motherhood - which began when she was a high school teacher, and her commitment to reproductive justice - which began when she became a Jane in Chicago's pre-Roe underground abortion service. Her experience as an elder, unavoidably growing more aware of ageism, sparked many of the poems in Announcements from the Planetarium, published by Flowstone in 2017. Simultaneously, the ferociously rising American antipathy to reproductive healthcare fostered her work in Hello. This is Jane., a fiction collection published by Left Fork in 2020. Visit juditharcana.com for info. See less