Catherine Woodard

I thank Rupert Murdoch for making me a poet. For 15 years I was an award-winning newspaper reporter and new media editor at New York Newsday and other publications, but left a Murdoch site that morphed from news to TV Guide Online. I thought I had a middle-grade novel in my head but happily wandered into poetry.

My manuscript Field of Reeds is a story that unfolds by poems but with a novelistic narrative. The story focuses on a family in a small town in the South of several decades ago struggling to live with a father who seems dead long before his suicide. It’s also a riff on the Egyptian manual for navigating the afterlife known in English as the Book of the Dead but by ancient Egyptians as Chapters for Coming Forth by Day. The narrator is the youngest child who notices some Egyptian associations in her family’s rituals and her fears about her father’s depression and alcoholism.

The narrator of Field of Reeds is trying to make sense and control the surface to manage overwhelming emotions and fears. Which is not all that different than why first the pharaohs and then any Egyptian who could afford it (eventually there were even Wal-Mart versions) wanted the security of a manual on how to live and how to die, how to find peace in the Field of Eternal Reeds.

I am a past president of Artists Space, one of the oldest alternative spaces in New York City for emerging visual artists. I have a masters in journalism from Columbia University and courses in the masters program in poetry at the New School University.

I live in New York with my husband, Nelson Blitz, Jr., and daughters, Perri and Allie, and wonderful art, thanks to my daughters’ talent and my husband’s eye. I play basketball on aging knees but still set a mean pick and will get you the ball if you’re open.