The students’ writing was the basis of a play and an anthology, both entitled Why Darkness Seems So Light. She has also worked with the Fort Wayne YWCA and the Fort Wayne Youtheatre to help high school students write about how they have been affected by violence. Helen worked with the Fort Wayne Dance Collective for over 10 years as part of an inter-disciplinary artistic team in a violence-prevention program incorporating creative movement, percussion, visual arts, and writing. Her second poetry collection, as if a dry wind, was published by Pecan Grove Press in 2009.

Winner Memorial Award and the Mary Carolyn Davies Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America.

Poems in that collection were also awarded the Robert H. Her first collection of poetry, Skin of a Fish, Bones of a Bird, won the Women Poets Series Competition in 1993 and was published by Ampersand Press. In Alaska, she taught for three years in a one-teacher school in Telida, an Athabascan community of about 25 people, and later taught fifth grade in Ketchikan. In Scotland, she taught at Kilquhanity House School, a progressive boarding school in the tradition of Summerhill. Before that she moved frequently, living in Scotland, Vermont, Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, and California. Since 1991, she has lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She has taught writing at all levels, from pre-school through university and adult education. She has published poetry, children’s books, anthologies, and a play, as well as a book about teaching writing. Throughout her career, writing and teaching have been inter-woven threads. She received her Masters degree in English from Indiana University in 1994. She graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Elementary Education and a concentration in English, with Philip Booth and W. When she was 11, her family moved to Wilbraham, Massachusetts, where she spent her teenage years. Helen Frost was born in Brookings, South Dakota, the fifth of ten children. She loves to travel, and has been to 48 states and 13 countries. She is the author of eleven novels-in-poems and seven picture books. She taught elementary school in Massachusetts, Vermont, Scotland, and Alaska, and now lives and writes in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Helen Frost has always loved poetry, and she especially loves sharing poetry with children through writing and teaching. Photo by Tim Andersen, Bel Air Photography Short Biography

Hidden by Helen Frost