Poets Digitise Towards Deeper Understanding

Award-winning poets Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball have never met.  In fact they live on different continents.  But that hasn't stopped them from collaborating on a series of poetry chapbooks designed to replace trite greeting cards with real sentiment.  With their 'celebration series', the two have developed a new concept for inexpensive holiday gifts.

Their chapbooks of poetry include Cherished Pulse (for anyone you love) with artwork from California artist Vicki Thomas, and She Wore Emerald Then (for mothers on your gift list) with photographs by May Lattanzio. A new booklet titled Imagining the future will be released over the next few weeks in time for Father's Day 2010, with further books for women everywhere, and there is a Christmas chapbook in the works.

The small books, a tradition in the poetry world since Elizabethan times, are priced to compete with greeting cards and provide real poems, designed, for the same price as a high end card, to go far beyond the cliché sentiments in most greeting cards.

Now both of these poets' collaborations, Cherished Pulse, and She Wore Emerald Then, have been released on the high profile Smashwords.com site, and can be read in over nine digital formats on any computer or portable reading device anywhere in the world.  Smashwords unique technology allows the work to be available into every format used by the millions of new e-book readers that are flooding the market. Even as the hardware and software change, the author's words will remain available to readers. This is quite a revolution for both authors, both of whom started their writing careers when the latest technology was a typewriter and carbon paper for copies.

Magdalena Ball runs the highly respected compulsivereader.com review site.  She is the author of the poetry book Repulsion Thrust, which was published in December 2009 to unanimous 5-star reviews.  Her novel Sleep Before Evening, published in 2007, was a Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist. 

Carolyn Howard-Johnson's poetry appears frequently in review journals. She is listed in Poets & Writers and her chapbook of poetry, Tracings (www.budurl.com/CarolynsTracings), was given the Award of Excellence by the Military Writers Society of America. She is also an award-winning novelist and short story writer and instructor for UCLA Extension Writers' Program.

For more information on any of the chapbooks in this poetry series, contact either of the authors or visit media rooms at www.howtodoitfrugally.com or  www.magdalenaball.com.