Nita Penfold

Nita Penfold is an award-winning poet and an artist creating from the light and dark currents of the spirit. Nita graduated from Lesley University’s Masters of Arts in Writing program and has her doctorate from Matthew Fox’s Wisdom University in California.  She identifies the poetry in a contemporary woman’s life through relationships and passages, digging deep for the taste of the grit and honey in everyday life. Her latest book, Loreen Says, contains story poems collected from her work—what the late Jennifer Bosveld, editor at Pudding House Publications, used to call “virtual journalism.” Autobiographical with a heavy dose of poetic license, Penfold reveals the repercussions of relationship in all its forms through feisty Loreen and her EveryFriend, Dottie.

Penfold’s poetry has been called luminous and soul-stirring and has been widely published in anthologies, including recently in the Charters & Charters text book, Literature & Its Writers (5th edition), the 2021 Women Artist’s Datebook from Syracuse Cultural Workers, and Northeastern’s journal, Pensive. Her first full length book, They Stand Up in Broken Shells won the 2006 Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Book Award.  Her poetry has also appeared in the New Yorker, Slipstream, Earth’s Daughters Magazine, and other small press journals.  Her other books are Landing in Oz and The Woman with the Wild-Grown Hair Complete Poems, all available on Amazon.

She currently lives in St. Louis with her composer husband, Nick Page.