Took House

Took House is Lauren Camp's fifth book of poetry. Previous books have been shortlisted for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award, the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize, and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. One Hundred Hungers, Camp's third book, won the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press. Lauren is deeply involved in the poetry community. She teaches young students to understand and embody poems for Poetry Out Loud and offers community workshops and mentoring to elders who want to explore poetry as a means for self-expression. As a visiting writer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and keynote speaker at the New Mexico Alzheimer s Caregiver Conference, she has brought an empathic, artistic perspective to doctors, patients and loved ones by sharing her poems on dementia and its effect on families. Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Slice, DIAGRAM and elsewhere, and been translated into Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish and Turkish. She is an emeritus Black Earth Institute fellow and the recipient of numerous residencies. For 15 years, she hosted a very popular public radio program, blending contemporary poetry with jazz and global music. Each week, her goal was to bring unexpected beauty to the airwaves. In her previous incarnation as a visual artist, Lauren made fiber portraits of her favorite musicians, and assembled a solo exhibit called The Fabric of Jazz, which traveled to museums in ten U.S. cities. She lives in a cozy household in New Mexico with her husband of 25 years and their elderly cat, Ella.