Laurel Snyder

Ahem.

The official announcement:

BAXTER, THE PIG WHO WANTED TO BE KOSHER author Laurel Snyder’s WALK TO THE WIDE SKY, a lyrical retelling of the Book of Exodus, to Emily Seife at Schwartz & Wade, by Tina Wexler at ICM (World).

This picture book has had its own long long  walk… it began forever ago, as a poem.  A poem I wrote (Sadly, I no longer have a copy)  in Tennessee for a political poetry class I took with Earl Braggs, and which I performed with a group of other readers, (in a round, if you can believe that) at Barking Legs Theater.

A few years later, I tried again to write about the plagues, in grad school, while studying with Marvin Bell. That go-around the poems was  published in the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, and a revised version was reprinted at Poets Against the War.

This version is very different. It’s pretty dark, but  not bleak I don’t think.  Not despairing. It’s forward-looking, Egypt seen through the eyes of a young boy.  The difference between the two version is, I think, a difference of  seven years, and motherhood.

I can’t wait to see art!

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