Arlene Distler

VT Poet Laureate Chard deNiord talks with Arlene Distler. Arlene Distler came to poetry after starting out as a painter and attending the Rhode Island School of Design. She has attended many retreats and workshops with such poets as Galway Kinnell, Marge Piercy, Molly Peacock, and Carolyn Kizer and rece received grants from the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Studio Center. She has attended retreats at the Phoenicia Center, Omega Institute, Frost Place, and Vermont Studio Center Distler's poetry has been published in online and print journals, and in anthologies including A Taste of Poetry, from the Walt Whitman Foundation Birchsong: Poetry Centered in Vermont, from Blueline Press; and Freedom's Just Another Word, from Outrider Press, as well as two Write Action anthologies. In 2014 Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Voices Like Wind Chimes. An as-yet unpublished full-length manuscript, Just This Body was a finalist in the 2017 Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. Distler is co-founder and a longtime member of Write Action, a writers' networking and advocacy organization based in Brattleboro. In recent years she's been finding the poetry in shape and color, as a ceramacist.