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Live From Stage IV Substack: A chronicle of my life and insights from living with metastatic kidney cancer
Book of Matches Issue 18 -- featuring "All The Birds"and "Mycophobia"
">The Biggest Mirror Ever Broken" in the Indlandia Journal Issue 17
"""Ideology"" in Brown Bag Online
The Fireflies Part The Air With Their Two Hands in Aftr Brunch Journal
Reflections of the Mind: Mental Health Poetry -- featuring poems “Sonnet of the Gate” and “The Geometry of Crazy”
Shame/less Poetry Anthology -- My poem "Biblical Archeology" appears in this anthology
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Emily Wharton earned her MFA from Hamline University. Her poems have appeared in Inlandia Journal, Book of Matches, After Brunch Poetry Journal, Brown Bag Online, Shame/less Poetry Anthology, and Reflections of the Mind: Mental Health Poetry. Her work is forthcoming in The Poetry Lighthouse, Indigo, and Top Shelf Literary Magazine, . She is the author of Zoomorphic: A Chapbook More information about her poetry and other projects can be found at https://poetry.one. She lives in Des Moines, Iowa, with her wife and their tiny Sheltie named Haiku.
I was born and raised in a tiny town in Northwest Iowa. I was born legally blind but the "professionals" thought it better to force me to do things visually and did not teach me braille. While this harmed me in many ways, it did lead me to develop the Code Master Braille Learning System to help adults learn braille. I was taught to be ashamed of my blindness, but after college, I was introduced to the National Federation of the Blind and developed a positive attitude toward blindness and started to shed the shame and fear. I spent 15 years teaching non-visual alternative techniques at Blindness: Learning In New Dimensions in Minneapolis. I fell in love with my amazing wife there and we've been together for more than half my life. We moved to Des Moines, Iowa and I worked for the state agency for about a decade before being diagnosed with stage IV kidney cancer. This taught me so many things,but most impactful for the narrative of my life, it taught me that life is too short and I needed to focus my time and attention on poetry..