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.  

Old World Wings

Coming October 2025

Grab a café au lait, curl up with a cozy blanket, and get your passport ready to embark on a vivid, narrative, poetic journey through the beauty and history of Europe!  Let a striking formal range of diverse poems whisk you off to Italy, where you can luxuriate in culinary ecstasy, Rome’s magical fountains and medieval churches, Firenze’s Renaissance paintings, domes, and towers, and Venice’s whispered canals and masquerade mysteries.  Visit Versailles, peering into the same ornate mirrors a fully powdered Marie Antoinette, sit in the incense swirled Notre Dame for Easter Sunday service (before the devastating fire), linger in the Louvre for hours, delighting to discover the Mona Lisa lives up to her hype.   Eastern Europe calls you with its string quartets in Vienna, Christmas markets and medieval bells in the Czech Republic, and learning gritty legends of Krampus. Walk the hallowed grounds of cemeteries, ghettos, and chilling Auschwitz/Birkenau reflecting on sobering Holocaust events. Joy returns in your visit to Ireland, where you learn wholeheartedly, magic is real.  Whether playing with sheep, dancing with faeries, or listening to bards tell Epic stories of  Celtic ancestors, you will see quickly why the Irish always have a good “crack” (craic). Immersed in thoughtful, layered European history, religion, culture, philosophy, and art, Old World Wings is a fierce and tender love letter of rich poetic storytelling, reminding us why experiencing the kaleidoscope of humanity around the world can help shake the dust off our wings and send us soaring.   

 

More information coming soon.