STATEMENT: I build poetry as one would a nest for wings to take hold. I set out on this journey many years ago. It was March. The calendar didn’t say Spring, but the cold rain in the rootstocks and legions of robins knew otherwise. I was tested by an English teacher who threatened to flunk me if I didn’t write the assigned vers libre poem. Since then I never did stop writing poems. One book I return to again and again was written by the French philosopher and semiologist, Roland Barthes: “A Lover’s Discourse, Fragments” (Hill and Wang: NY, 1977, translated from the French by Richard Howard). It goes with me everywhere because my relations with the earth as well as the world of women and men partially feel to be pilgrimages, set out for in the dark, cold rain. This is near to Barthes’s figuration: “To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.” ~ Donna Fleischer / PUBLICATIONS: FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS: Poets for Living Waters: An International Response to the 2010 BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (BlazeVox,2013);/ EOAGH, Exit Strata, Kō (Japan), Lilliput Review, and Naugatuck River Review. The Useful Knowledge Press (New Haven, CT) is bringing out a limited edition of Donna’s haiku with wood block engravings by Allan Greenier in 2014, entitled 11 HAIKU. // JOURNALS: Artis magazine, Asahi Shimbun, Back Room Live !, Bones, bottle rockets, Cornell University's Mann Library Daily Haiku, Esque, Exit Strata, Fieralingue, Frogpond, Hummingbird, Issaʼs Untidy Hut, Kō, Lilliput Review, Modern Haiku, On Barcelona, Poets Corner, Presence, roadrunner, Salamander Cove, Solitary Plover, South by Southeast, The Mainichi Daily News, and Wang Pingʼs Kinship of Rivers / FIRST CHAPBOOK: Intimate Boundaries (self- produced and published, 1991) / OTHER: Donna’s poetry appears regularly in literary periodicals in Japan, England, and the U. S., anthologies, and monthly on the CT Environmental Headlines website (Christopher Zurcher, editor). Her blog word pond, begun in March 2010, is a curatorial content blog of poetry, literature, music, visual arts, depth ecology, ecopoetics, news stories, and permaculture. / FEATURE READINGS: Capital Community College, Hartford CT; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; Forbes Library, Northampton, MA; cell39 gallery, Ludlow, MA; Pegasus Gallery of Middlesex Community College, Middletown, CT; WordForge Reading Series, Hartford, CT; and Wintonbury Public Library, Bloomfield, CT. She was assistant editor of bottle rockets journal, anthologies, and serial volumes from 2007–2013. / FORTHCOMING: Her work will appear in EOAGH, Exit Strata, Lilliput Review, and Naugatuck River Review. The Useful Knowledge Press (New Haven, CT) is bringing out a limited edition of Donna’s haiku with wood block engravings by Allan Greenier in late 2014, entitled 11 HAIKU. / EDUCATION: Poetry and Communication Theory, Semiotics, Pragmatics, American and English Literature and History, Botany, and Ecology. University of Connecticut and University of Hartford. BA degree 1988. Also completed independent study in ecology at the Talcott Mountain Science Center, Avon, CT. / LIVELIHOOD: master pre-press journeyman in four-color process stripping for thirty years. She transitioned to digital technologies in the textbook publishing industry as a Mac operator and proofreader, and now offers copyediting and proofreading on a freelance basis. // THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST.

Twinkle, Twinkle (Longhouse, 2010), indra's net (bottle rockets press, 2003)

Dreams Wander On: Contemporary Poems of Death Awareness (Modern English Tanka Press, 2011), seed packets an anthology of flower haiku (bottle rockets press, 2010), lanterns: a firefly anthology (bottle rockets press, 2007), Contemporary Haibun Volume 4 (Red Moon Press, 2003)