Bio
Naomi Buck Palagi grew up in the woods of central Kentucky. She has since lived in Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, Ohio, Chicago, and northwest Indiana. Along the way she has gathered experience in theater, music, dance, fiction, play-writing, carpentry, teaching, and office work, among other things. She earned a Bachelors degree in History and in Interdisciplinary Theatre and Dance: Performance as Activism at Oberlin College in Ohio. She received her Masters of Liberal Studies with a focus in poetry from Indiana University Northwest.
Naomi’s writing influences range from Nikki Finney, Peter Gizzi, Harryette Mullen, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Chaucer, Barbara Kingsolver, David Mitchell, and Harold Pinter, among others. Her published poetry ranges from the relatively traditional to the experimental, including cross-genre pieces such as “radio, news” (Masque & Spectacle) and multi-voiced chorales (BlazeVox, Otoliths, Requited.) In her work, a unifying style can be found in a sense of human connection and presence, immediacy, and an appreciation of the deep contradictions in life. Naomi’s father, David C. Buck, is a translator of Tamil literature and a retired math teacher. Having both of these languages very present around the house, as well as her father’s abiding love of puns, helped infuse Naomi with an awareness of the arbitrariness of language and the infinite possibilities for play, discovery, and delight through words. Her mother, Pem Davidson Buck, is an anthropologist who instilled in Naomi from an early age the need to examine scenarios from many angles, and to not be satisfied with simplistic or misleading answers, but to dig deeper to see what can be found. She is married to Jason Palagi, an English major turned molecular ecologist, and and they live in Mississippi with their two teenagers, a pup, and a rabbit. Naomi has had work published in numerous journals including Spoon River Poetry Review, BlazeVox, Masque and Spectacle, Otoliths, Eleven Eleven, and others. She has two chapbooks, silver roof tantrum (dancing girl press) and Darkness in the Tent (Dusie Kollectiv.) More of her poetry can be found at [email protected] Stone is her first book. |