Barbara Presnell lives in Lexington, North Carolina. She teaches in the Writing Program and the Honors Program at UNC-Charlotte. She has published five collections of poetry. Her book, Piece Work, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize and was published by CSU in 2007. In 2009-11, the Touring Theatre of North Carolina performed an adaptation of Piece Work in community colleges and other venues throughout North Carolina. Other recent work appears in the journals storySouth, Appalachian Journal, Innisfree Poetry Journal, War, Literature, and the Arts, and the anthology, Women’s Realities, Women’s Choices. Her newest collection, Blue Star, traces her family’s involvement in war from the Civil War to the present, and is based on military records, census reports, letters, journals, and photographs. To complete the collection, this spring she retraced her father’s World War II journey from Omaha Beach to the Elbe River in Germany, following his map and journal entries.
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In order to preserve the artistic arrangement of the writing, this piece has been created with Print2Flash Flashpaper.