Odd Flowers and Shorteared Owls: Poems - numbered & signed by author & artist numbered 6 of 50

Odd Flowers and Shorteared Owls: Poems - numbered & signed by author & artist
numbered 6 of 50
Author: Vi Gale
drawings by Liza Jones
ISBN-13: 9780915986194
ISBN-10: 0915986191
Publisher: Prescott Street Press
multiple copyrights 1959, 1965, 1970, 1973, 1974, 1984
Slipcased Hardcover
6.5 x 9.2 inches, 94 pages

Viola M. Gale (née Håkansson; 1917 – 2007) was a Swedish-born American poet and publisher, who worked in the United States state of Oregon. She began writing poems and short stories that were published in minor magazines and reviews in the 1950s. Gale's first book was published in 1959, and released five more throughout her life. In 1974, she established the small printing house Prescott Street Press in Portland to promote unknown authors and produce well-designed affordable books. One of Gale's works was selected by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission to be one of 100 Oregon books from 1800 to 2000 that "best representing the state's literary heritage" in 2003.
Following the end of World War II, she found employment authoring product promotions and steadily started writing poems and short stories in the 1950s. Gale's work was published in minor magazines and reviews and she won the Oregon Poetry Prize in 1954. In 1955, she met poet May Sarton at a writer's conference at the University of Colorado Boulder, and was encouraged by Sarton to continue writing poetry. Gale won the 1958 Swallow Press New Poetry Series Award. In 1959, she sent a poetry collection to publisher Alan Swallow, who became her mentor and brought out her first book, Several Houses, that year. Gale's second book, Love Always, followed six years later. Throughout the 1960s, she additionally connected with contemporaneously Swedish poetry and read it. Gale began teaching as director of creative writing workshops at the Young Women's Christian Association in 1962, was the writer-in-residence for Eastern Oregon College in 1968, and lectured at Clatsop Community College in 1969.
She authored Nineteen Ing Poems in 1970, then Clouded Sea a year later, and Clouded Sea in 1974. In 1974, Gale established the small publishing house Prescott Street Press, to promote unknown authors and produce affordable books that were well-designed. The publishing house received initial support from grants by the National Endowment for the Arts and had national distribution and helped to begin the career of several writers. Her final writing of poems, Odd Flowers & Short-Eared Owls, was self-published in 1984

Very Good+ condition - slipcased with no jacket