Milwaukee Poet, Stephen Anderson, will be helping us celebrate National Poetry Month by reading from his book, High Wire, and answering questions.

High Wire by Stephen Anderson is a collection of new and selected poems that deals with several themes. It is not a “pandemic book” per se, but it does deal with pandemic-imposed changes and complications that we all have had to face to one degree or another, e.g., family separation, loss of connection with friends, death, vulnerability to known and unknown aspects of our lives, love, as well as the risks involved in personal choices that life tosses our way from time to time. In short, we all must venture onto our own personal “high wire” and learn to balance our way to carving our own destiny. And we must strive to cope with all of life’s curveballs with grace and as much skill as we can muster.

Stephen Anderson is a Milwaukee poet and translator whose work has appeared in Southwest Review, Verse Wisconsin, Foundling Review, Twist In Time, Tipton Poetry Journal, New Purlieu Review, Free Verse, Latin American Literature Today, and Blue Heron Review, as well as in numerous other print and online journals. Many of his poems have been featured on the Milwaukee NPR affiliate WUWM Lake Effect Program. Anderson is the author of three chapbooks, as well as three full length collections, In the Garden of Angels and Demons (2017), The Dream Angel Plays The Cello (2019) and High Wire (2021).

In the summer of 2013, six of his poems formed the text for a chamber music song cycle entitled The Privileged Secrets of the Arch performed by some musicians from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and an opera singer. Anderson’s work is being archived in the Stephen Anderson Collection in the Special Collections Section of the Raynor Libraries at Marquette University.