About the Author

Ruth Moon Kempher, an ex-navy brat, and ex-navy wife, was born in Red Bank, NJ in 1934, while her father was studying Classics at Rutgers. Her poetry and short prose-fiction and critical articles-have appeared in journals and other periodical publications since verse publications in the early 1960's, in McCall's, The Saturday Evening Post, Bitterroot, and The Village Voice. She is now retired from owning The White Lion Tavern in the historic San Agustin Antigua area of St. Augustine, Florida, and from twenty-five years of teaching in the English Departments, of first Flagler College, where she taught Creative Writing for her tuition, with a Florida Teacher's license based on her publications, and then, after obtaining her MA at Emory University, for twenty-one years for St. Johns River State College at various St. Augustine campuses. Since 1993, she has published the work of many poets through her Kings Estate Press, in single chapbooks and anthologies-collections which are always illustrated, including those of Gerald Locklin, Wayne Hogan, Hilary Tham, D. E. Steward and David Chorlton. She is also the author of Always the Beautiful Answer: A Prose Poem Primer, now in second printing. In 2012, her manuscript What I Can Tell You won the Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award, and it was published in Spring, 2013. Another book-length collection, Retrievals, was released from Presa Press in June, 2015, and the chapbook, The Skinny About J's Zinnias was issued by Chiron Review Press in 2016.

Reviews

Ruth Moon Kempher writes poems that are both passionate and compassionate. She has a keen eye for minutia as well as for the big picture. Her joie de vivre and intelligence make her one of the best poets of the Boom generation. -Eric Greinke Ruth Moon Kempher has not limited herself to the armchair knowledge learned from books, but has sought more meaningful knowledge and understanding by traveling the world, visiting the stomping grounds of iconic historical and cultural figures. In Magikal Waters, Kempher chronicles her Mediterranean odyssey, following in the footsteps of gods, queens, artists and oracles, weaving her own clever and sometimes quirky, sometimes very personal insights into the fabric of human history. -Michael Hathaway