Announcing Angel of the Unknown, available September 9, 2026 through Amazon and other platforms. ~ Amazon link here ~
Zoom book launch and poetry reading on Friday, September 25, at 6:30 pm PDT.
For more information, please inquire through the website.
You have never known such molten wings before,
you children of the earth, the air and seas.
I am your tide of tumult,
and the door flung open wide to all uncertainties. . . .
THE POEMS IN THIS VOLUME were almost all written since 2020, when the pandemic and other events ushered in a watershed moment for many.
Questions carried for decades have perhaps never felt so urgent on both a mass and personal scale.
These poems explore moments, insights and gestures which might further enliven such deep questions, inviting a movement toward something truly new, unknown. All amid the most challenging of forces. The poems are perhaps asking, through images and word-song, if this is not the very play of forces for which we've been preparing all our lives--and the only configuration in which true growth is possible.
Claudia Jensen Dudley grew up near San Francisco and received her B.A. from Stanford University. Poetry, music and traditional world literature have been profound influences since childhood. In 1989, she trained with California Poets in the School and worked as a poet-teacher in San Francisco and other Bay Area schools until 2011.
She developed a large storytelling repertoire during 16 years of work as an after school poetry teacher. Epic myth cycles and folk tales, accompanied by live, improvised harp music, became an integral part of her teaching workshops.
From 2013 to 2022, she also led creative writing/memoir classes for seniors at The Sequoias and Vintage Coventry, senior living communities in San Francisco. She has published two volumes and a chapbook of poetry and has composed three song cycles for soprano and piano. Married to writer William Dudley (author, The Chosen River), a mother of two daughters and grandmother of two, she has deep ongoing interests in history, comparative religion and holistic health. She has also been a practicing reflexologist.