Shirley Powell - Villages and Towns

Shirley Powell, born May 5, 1931, grew up in an Ohio hamlet during the Great Depression, where everyone knew or thought they knew everyone else. Though there aren’t Gotham’s eight million stories to be told of this tiny community, there are many, and the child born there recreates and honors in this collection the small and less eventful lives of the overlooked and overflown part of the United States.

While Villages and Towns might make some readers think of Steinbeck or Faulkner's portrayals of the poor and downtrodden, Powell became, during her peak years, an urban poet. She arrived in Manhattan in 1971, after her studies at Miami University, Oxford, OH, and worked as a substitute teacher in the New York City Schools. A survivor of childhood polio wearing a leg brace, she nonetheless navigated New York's bus and subway systems, occasionally being thrown down stairwells in the schools where she taught.

Along with Barbara A. Holland and Brett Rutherford, she was a participant in Manhattan’s unofficial Gothic poetry circle, often hosting readings in her Greenwich Village apartment, whose walls were painted black. Her first book of poems, Parachutes, appeared in 1975 from The Dragon's Mouth Press. Later, she compiled and published an anthology, Womansong, the offshoot of a Women's Liberation reading at New York University where she was attending graduate school. She hosted The Village Poetry Workshop and co-hosted (with Boruk Glasgow) The Sign of the Black Cats poetry readings at The Cafe Feenjon. Her Poet’s Press editions include Rooms, Other Rooms, and Alternate Lives, and as a featured poet in the anthology May Eve, A Festival of Supernatural Poetry.

After her move to upstate New York, she founded, in 1981, The Stone Ridge Poetry Society, in Ulster County. She edited the Society's literary magazine, Oxalis, from 1988 to 1994, through all 23 of its issues.

With “The Catskill Caravan,” she traveled through the Metro New York area and New England, staging poetry readings.

In her 1993 notes for the first edition of this book, Powell wrote: “The people in these poems lived — perhaps some still do. Their names have been changed to protect the reader’s innocence. Anyway, you do know someone like them; at least you do if you know yourself.”

Sometime after the death of her partner Mildred Barker, Powell relocated to Indiana, where, in a retirement community, she found herself cut off from people interested in poetry. She was grateful that her work was being kept in circulation, but wrote no more. She died there, December 4, 2019.

Second edition published March 2026. EPUB3 Ebook. $2.99. Originally published in print in 1993 in a hand-bound edition limited to 200 copies.