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The Fireflies Part The Air With Their Two Hands in Aftr Brunch Journal
"Ideology"" in Brown Bag Online
Shame/less Poetry Anthology -- My poem "Biblical Archeology" appears in this anthology
Live From Stage IV Substack: A chronicle of my life and insights from living with metastatic kidney cancer
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Emily Wharton earned her MFA from Hamline University. She has had poems published in After Brunch Poetry Journal, Shame/less Poetry Anthology, Brown Bag Online and forthcoming in Book of Matches, Inlandia Journal, The Poetry Lighthouse, Top Shelf Literary Magazine, and the Rough Diamond Mental Health anthology. 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..