Amanda Hayden

Hayden is the current Poet Laureate for Sinclair College and Professor of Humanities, Philosophy, and World Religions (emphasis in Indigenous, Eastern, and Environmental Studies.) She has received several pedagogy awards, including the Chicago Interfaith Core Award (2018), Humanities Professor of the Year (2019) and the prestigious League for Innovation Teaching Excellence Award (2020). She has written academically for years, including for textbooks such as Eco-pedagogies: Practical Approaches to Experiential Learning.  But her passion has always been poetry.  She has had over 30 poems published in anthologies, print and online journals, and literary magazines.  Her debut poetry collection, American Saunter, inspired by backpacking and traveling across the dusty winding roads of the U.S., is forthcoming by FlowerSong Press in late Fall 2024.    Old World Wings, her second poetry collection inspired by her European travels, is forthcoming by Wild Ink Publishing in Summer/Fall 2025.  She lives on a windy little farm with her superhero partner, fierce daughters, and many furry rescue babies including two goats, seven pigs, and an incredibly special, blind, three-legged “angel in a dog suit” Vinny Valentine.  

How to Tie Tobacco

How to Tie Tobacco is inspired by the author’s tobacco farming Southern matriarchs. From humorous tales of “almost” funerals, lost squirrels, and party lines, to trials of maternal loss, abuse, and illness, to survival instincts and resilience, this collection is a deep-rooted, tender love letter to matrilineal lineage and carrying on the wisdom of generations of formidable women.

“This collection feels sacredly passed down, like a secret recipe or a home remedy.” – Sara Moore Wagner, Poet and Managing Poetry Editor of Driftwood Press, Author of Lady Wing Shot, Swan Wife, and Hillbilly Madonna

“A. M. Hayden’s poetry sings like the winds rustling through the leaves of the south and in the holler…This is a love letter to multiple generations of Ma-mas.” – J. R. Simons, Publisher, Simple Simons Press

 “A stunning debut chapbook…(the) author presses hands with ancestors in dream and form…diving into the invisibly treacherous waters women have always been made to navigate.” – Holly Brians Ragusa, Author of Met the End, Inverse, and Tilt a World, President of Ohio Poetry Association

Old World Wings

Grab a café au lait and get your book passport ready to embark on a vivid, narrative poetic adventure through a thoughtful, layered lens of European history, religion, culture, philosophy, and art.  “Old World Wings: Poems of Europe” is a “striking formal range of poetry,” taking readers on a “sensory journey” through Italy, France, Eastern Europe, and Ireland. Whether it’s Rome’s magical fountains and medieval churches, Venice’s whispered canals and masquerade mysteries, peering into the same ornate mirrors a fully powdered Marie Antoinette once did, attending Notre Dame for Easter Sunday service (before the devastating fire), listening to Irish bards tell Epic stories of Celtic ancestors, hearing string quartets in Vienna or medieval bells, and gritty legends of Krampus in the Czech Republic, the “evocative and atmospheric poems veer between the ancient and the contemporary but never lose their reverence of landscape and of mood, their rigorous language of sensuality and powerful sensation.”   A fierce and evocative love letter of rich poetic storytelling, Old World Wings reminds us why reverence for the kaleidoscope of humanity around the world can shake the dust off our wings and send us soaring.