Deborah Slicer

Poet and philosopher Deborah Slicer earned a PhD and an MFA at the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. Naomi Shihab Nye selected Slicer’s first poetry collection, The White Calf Kicks (2003), for the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s public radio program The Writer’s Almanac and in the anthologies Red, White and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America (2004) and The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2005).
 

Pared and direct, Slicer’s poetry inhabits both interior and natural wilderness. Reviewing The White Calf Kicks, Deborah Bogen observed, “This is a poet who, knowing her earthly limits, remains obsessively preoccupied with both the difficult and the joyous mysteries of life. Her experience is so direct, so without interpretive interlude that she moves from Montana landscape to metaphysical moment in a heartbeat.”
 
Slicer has taught at the University of Montana and the Hawthorne School and has been involved with the Missoula Writing Collaborative. She lives near Missoula.