IF YOU ONLY KNEW
POEMS BY DENNIS SAMPSON
There is an extraordinarily thoughtful mind at work here, with a spiritual underpinning that I find intensely moving.
~ Carolyn Kizer, Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for YIN
Dennis Sampson’s new chapbook offers some of the greatest poems of an American master late in his seventh decade. The poems are elegant and as clear and deep as the pristine water of Oregon’s Crater Lake. Addressing such themes as childhood, love, spirituality, the American South, and death, these lyric narrative poems will transform you.
The Author: Dennis Sampson was born and raised in South Dakota. His previous volumes of poetry include The Double Genesis, Forgiveness, Constant Longing, Needlegrass, For my Father Falling Asleep at Saint Mary’s Hospital, Within the Shadow of a Man, The Lunatic in the Trees, and Selected Poems. This is the fourth book published by Homestead Lighthouse Press.
The recipient of grants from The Virginia Council on the Arts and The North Carolina Arts Council, Sampson’s poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Ohio Review, The Hudson Review, and many other periodicals. He has taught as Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College in Virginia and as Visiting Poet in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at University of North Carolina Wilmington and Wake Forest University. He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
If You Only Knew by Dennis Sampson • November 15, 2025 • Poetry • Hardcover • $18.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-47-6 • Trade Paper • $12.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-48-3 • 44 Pages
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WHAT IT MUST BE LIKE FOR YOU
POEMS BY DENNIS SAMPSON
Simultaneously intimate and worldly, Dennis Sampson’s poems sound like no one else’s. They are wholly original in the sense that they go back to the origins of their insights and emotions, and deliver them to us in language that is plainspoken yet frequently surprising. There’s a sense of wonderment—his word—that runs throughout this collection and allows him to move from the small epiphanies of daily life to questions and perceptions on a grand scale. This is a book with big wings, a powerful inquiry into the nature of human consciousness. Sampson’s poems are both modest and fiercely intelligent. They should be on every poetry-lover’s shelves.
~ Chase Twichell, Author of Perdido and Things as They Is
Sex and death. Pornography. Hatred. Little children in the war in Gaza and Ukraine referred to as collateral damage. The strangulation that takes some ten minutes while looking directly into your wife’s eyes on the kitchen floor. And then there is the delicate appearance, say, of a male cardinal that plucks up a sunflower seed thrown out in the yard by the narrator of these gentle poems and inserts it into the beak of one who will become his companion for life. In his tenth book, Dennis Sampson lays at the feet of the horrors of our being in the 21st Century an argument that speaks on behalf of kindness and love and self-understanding. An old house in America. A front porch. And the words of nobody’s fool who has been writing poems for well over half a century about what Schopenhauer once referred to as “life’s delicate child.”
What It Must Be Like for You by Dennis Sampson • September 29, 2024 • Poetry • Hardcover • $26.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-38-4 • Trade Paper • $18.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-37-7 • 100 Pages
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WHAT MORE COULD THE UNIVERSE WANT
POEMS BY DENNIS SAMPSON
Every poem in the collection is strong and complete, and each line of every poem is sculpted brilliantly and perfectly placed.
~ Dan Domench, Short Story Writer, Playwright, Screenwriter
The poems in this collection look upwards, where “Deep sky is, of all visual impressions, the nearest akin to a feeling” (Coleridge, Notebooks) and where the poet asks, having “lost my way in the sky – now, where?” (Osip Mandelstam)
Now, where, indeed. Sampson’s masterful lyricism and storytelling describe the sweetness and longing of a challenging life come to fruition. His are must-read poems for any lover of the art and any seeker of spiritual truth.
What More Could the Universe Want: Poems by Dennis Sampson • December 30, 2022 • Poetry • Hardcover • $34.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-29-2 • Trade Paper • $16.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-30-8 • 86 Pages
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Poems That Stand with the Greatest of the Author’s Generation
SELECTED POEMS
BY DENNIS SAMPSON
Selected Poems collects the best of Dennis Sampson’s poetry from seven previous volumes.
Long considered by his peers to be a cherished “poet’s poet” – a rare accolade – Dennis Sampson could just as easily be described as “a poetry reader’s poet.” The compliment fits because Sampson has always been the most voracious of poetry readers and talkers. His beloved, wholly assimilated influences include Dante and Theodore Roethke, William Blake and Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop and D. H. Lawrence, among others.
A fierce practitioner and teacher of the art of poetry, Sampson has always lived an independent, rigorous life of principle as he has come to believe in it. Poetry first, Poetry last & Poetry in between might well be his motto. Poetry is his life and his life, in all its strange guises and mazy motions, is in the poetry.
In an era of handsomely written books of poetry largely about their own skill with language, it’s more than breathtaking to encounter a poet who writes for the most basic reason: because he has to.
~ Philip Levine
Selected Poems by Dennis Sampson • October 21, 2019 • Poetry • Hardcover • $24.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-00-1 • Trade Paper • $16.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-01-8 • 214 Pages
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Short Stories That Almost Read Like Poems
DWARF STORIES
BY BRUCE LAWDER
I call these short stories “dwarf stories” because they are shorter than the usual short. They are a way, it seems to me, to talk about what dwarfs us today, in this age of mass communication, and how we live, or can live, as individual human beings, in such a world.
~ Bruce Lawder
These short pieces are not quite flash fiction and not quite prose poetry, though they share the best virtues of both. They wrench narrative and poetry in new directions and fire the synapses in unexpected ways. These pieces are odd and oddly compelling. For that reason, they are also fun.
The Author: American writer Bruce Lawder divides his time between an apartment in Switzerland and a house in France. In addition to writing poems, stories, plays, and occasional essays on poetry, he has published articles on painting in the catalogs of a number of major museums in France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Before deciding to earn his living as a teacher, he was an actor at the Charles Street Playhouse in Boston, Massachusetts. He has published four other volumes of poetry, including Shorelines from Homestead Lighthouse Press, as well as a book of essays, Vers le vers. His most recent play, Computer Time, was performed in 2022 at the American Theatre of Actors in New York City.
Dwarf Stories by Bruce Lawder • July 14, 2024 • Fiction • Trade Paper • $18.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-34-6 • 300 Pages
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THE MAN OF THE FAMILY
BY ROBERT WALLACE BENNETT
A boy’s military father eventually abandons the family, leaving the author as a child to grow up supporting his family with a dizzying array of jobs while putting himself through school and, in the process, becoming perhaps one of the most important experts on rabbits in the world. Bennett serves in the military and sees action during the Korean War. He also manages to earn multiple degrees and works for some of the largest companies in the world, all while supporting his family. It is almost as if Bennett never sleeps. His advice on rabbits is sought after by people around the world, and his many books on the subject have sold in the thousands in dozens of countries.
The Man of the Family by Robert Wallace Bennett • December 10, 2022 • Memoir • Trade Paper • $15.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-27-8 • 214 Pages
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SHORELINES
POETRY BY BRUCE LAWDER
The shorelines of these poems are not those of the Atlantic and the Pacific, framing one mighty and dominant land mass, that of the United States, “from sea to shining sea” but those of the great Continental Divide, the two sides of the Atlantic separating “Old Europe” from what some once called “The New World”: two land masses distinct since the two tectonic plates began to drift apart. Lawder knows both continents intimately. He was born and raised and had his first adult experiences in the United States, on the Eastern Seaboard, and now divides his time between Switzerland and France. As Lawder himself does, the poems in this volume shift, or travel, from place to place, residing however temporarily in the city and the country, moving from continent to continent, where exile and homecoming are somehow always one.
Shorelines: Poetry by Bruce Lawder • February 3, 2023 • Poetry • Trade Paper • $16.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-2-3 • 92 Pages
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DESTINATIONS
POEMS BY MICHAEL FAVALA GOLDMAN
In his third collection of poetry with Homestead Lighthouse Press, the aptly named Destinations, Michael Favala Goldman confronts readers with hope and frustration about where humans are heading. Among breakdowns of bodies and relationships, he portrays a universe where “nothing can be other than it is” yet is “already outdated” when measured against the wonders that are time and space. In sections on family and marriage, unity and community, death and memory, Goldman contrasts the timelessness of Nature with what “changes daily, / like traffic, weather, / body indexes, and / trace mineral levels[,]” simultaneously documenting both humans’ impact and their insignificance.
The Author: Michael Favala Goldman is an award-winning poet, jazz clarinetist, and translator of Danish literature. Among his seventeen translated books is Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, which made The New York Times “Best 10 Books of 2021” as Book Three of The Copenhagen Trilogy. Goldman’s work has appeared in scores of publications, including The New Yorker, Rattle, and The Harvard Review. A resident of Northampton, Massachusetts, Goldman has been running bi-monthly poetry critique groups since 2018.
Michael Favala Goldman Website
Michael Favala Goldman on Facebook
Michael Favala Goldman on YouTube
The Copenhagen Trilogy on The New York Times “Best 10 Books of 2021“
Destinations by Michael Favala Goldman • January 25, 2025 • Poetry • Trade Paper • $18.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-40-7 • 110 Pages • $9.00 • ISBN 978-950475-41-4
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SPEAK UP RADIO FIREBIRD BOOK AWARD WINNER
AMERICAN WRITING AWARDS FINALIST 2022
THIS MAY SOUND FAMILIAR
POEMS BY MICHAEL FAVALA GOLDMAN
This May Sound Familiar by Michael Favala Goldman hits that sweet spot between the intellect and the heart. These poems mine domestic conflict, nature, and the creative process to find breakthroughs to belonging, despite pride, rejections, and self-sabotage. “It’s always sunrise somewhere. / … irrepressible, the arc / of awakening.”
This May Sound Familiar: Poetry by Michael Favala Goldman • August 18, 2022 • Poetry • Trade Paper • $16.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-25-4 • 112 Pages
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WINNER, GOLDEN BOAR BOOK AWARDS
WINNER, LOS ANGELES BOOK FESTIVAL 2022 (POETRY)
POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021
SMALL SOVEREIGN
POEMS BY MICHAEL FAVALA GOLDMAN
Small Sovereign is Michael Favala Goldman’s second full-length collection of poetry. Short, direct, ironic, and touching, his poems get richer with multiple readings. “Don’t expect me to stand in the way / I’m small everywhere / except in my little life / where I am a clumsy giant / trying desperately not / to destroy my own city.” While exploring the paradox of personal power and powerlessness with irony and tenderness, these poems inhabit the space between the material world and emotion-based relationships, placing us starkly in the gap, with the responsibility for bridging it, amid both progress and failure: “It’s almost too much, growing / a love that consumes everything.”
Goldman invites us to join him in small, overlooked, and transformational experiences, such as picking up a hurt elk, walking by a train car diner, riding an escalator, touring fields in Verona, making soup for a sick friend, gluing a broken table, choosing flooring. “All that separates you / from your surroundings / is your imagination / of yourself being who you are.” Goldman is especially qualified to show us how everyday experience can open a door to the universal; drawing on his talents as a remodeling carpenter, a jazz musician, a Danish translator, a gardener, and a parent, he fosters in us greater awareness of life’s minute pains and victories from numerous points of view. “We are all sharing atoms, at least / . . . / like the sea mixes with the sky / words do not keep them apart.”
Small Sovereign by Michael Favala Goldman • January 10, 2022 • Poetry • Trade Paper • $16.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-16-2 • 90 Pages • Ebook • $6.99 • ISBN: 978-950475-17-9
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THE GIRL WHO QUIT AT LEVITICUS
POEMS BY SUZANNE RHODENBAUGH
From rich and varied gardens in the land of the Civil War through the chill of the far north, Suzanne Rhodenbaugh’s poems ring with honesty, longing, and humor. She loves flowers and makes them sing, seasons lonely days with plans and sass, and can make her readers quake with fear. What a mastery of language enriches her poems!
~ Pamela Harrison, Author of Whirligig
The poems in Suzanne Rhodenbaugh’s The Girl Who Quit at Leviticus offer a rich and varied world replete with lush gardens and their attendant “gloppy rot,” with oceans full of our detritus and dogs that lean from car windows “grinning in the wind.” Presiding over this “crosshatch” world is an artist God who fashions an “ornamental ironwork” of winter limbs against the sky but who, in another mood, can be “full of the devil.” Clearly, Rhodenbaugh’s eye and heart are capacious enough to love it all, even those injustices she rails against, because, as she reminds us, “you want in your heart’s keep / some shadows.” The music of these lines, the wry humor, and the precise imagery combine to create the voice of a woman who has lived deeply and gleaned a bit of wisdom in that living. We are fortunate that she has chosen to pass it along.
~ Marjorie Stelmach, Author of Walking the Mist
The poems in The Girl Who Quit at Leviticus deftly avoid the sentimentality associated with such topics as sex and death, and laugh in the face of religiosity (“I want. . .God in pants, and full of the devil.”). I was mesmerized by this work – as you will be – until its last, satisfying line.
~ Lynne Thompson, Los Angeles Poet Laureate, 2021-2022
The Author: Suzanne Rhodenbaugh is a poet, essayist, and critic. She is the author of more than a half-dozen poetry collections and chapbooks. Widely published, Rhodenbaugh’s poems, essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in such periodicals as The American Scholar, The Hudson Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, and Poetry East, and in anthologies published by, among others, Columbia University, Black Sparrow Press, and Texas Review Press. Born in Tampa, Florida, to Georgia natives, Rhodenbaugh lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
The Girl Who Quit at Leviticus: Poems by Suzanne • March 2, 2022 • Poetry • Trade Paper • $13.04 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-18-6 • 72 Pages
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EVERY POSSIBLE THING
POEMS BY KAREN POPPY
In Every Possible Thing, Karen Poppy’s imagery soars and her unique vision leads us into a world of literary allusions, of life’s glory, of the earth, of water and waves, of suicide and the harshness of life and death. Exquisitely written, with attention to the smallest detail, to the vastness of mythology, these elegant poems compel the reader to turn the page in order to be richly rewarded by these tender pieces. Haunting, bewitching, evocative, her poems are often other-worldly.
~ Virginia Chase Sutton
Skillfully written, always engaging, Karen Poppy’s collection comprises poems of discovery, philosophy, other worlds, spirits, and more. Gorgeous poem follows gorgeous poem, as in the title poem, where hands become “[s]ilver-skinned gloves” and the speaker urges the beloved to “[w]ear me like finery.” In the heart-breaking beauty of landscape, where no subject, such as the creation of a grain of sand, is too small, Poppy pushes the envelope between Here and Somewhere Else, where we may or may not be going soon. Philosophically intelligent, metaphorically magical, Poppy surprises us with her unexpected explorations and surprising breakthroughs. Along the way, she earns our trust, and we double back to re-read poems and want more. Karen Poppy is a poet to savor, and watch.
The Author: Karen Poppy, a non-binary poet, is the author of Diving at the Lip of the Water (Beltway Editions), her debut collection, and two other chapbooks (Finishing Line Press). Poppy’s poem “Ghost in the Machine” was nominated in 2023 for a Pushcart Prize and was published in the anthology Qualia Nous (Vol. 2). Her poem “The Aisle Not Taken” was selected by Tracy K. Smith, 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, to read on the latter’s national radio show and podcast “The Slowdown.” Poppy has published in The Cortland Review, Naugatuck River Review, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, and the Wallace Stevens Journal, among other journals and periodicals. An attorney licensed in California and Texas, Poppy lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
Every Possible Thing: Poems by Karen Poppy • June 3, 2020 • Poetry • Trade Paper • $8.07 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-7-7 • 38 Pages
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THE GIFT OF NOT FINDING
POEMS FOR MEDITATION BY CAROL ALENA ARONOFF
Carol Alena Aronoff’s seventh book of poems could not possibly arrive at a better time. As people around the world seek to discover the “new normal,” Aronoff’s poems open windows and doors into meditation and the lasting beauty of the natural world.
As the poet Robert McDowell writes in the Foreword, “The Gift of Not Finding: Poems for Meditation by Carol Alena Aronoff embodies stillness. Perhaps this is the secret goal of all poetry when it is most fit in consciousness and memory. For what does one desire more than peace and the absence of worry and speculation it brings? Poetry that achieves and evokes stillness — dare I say “perfect” stillness — is a gift that allows one to breathe deeply and be love.”
The Author: Carol Alena Aronoff, Ph.D., is a psychologist, teacher, and writer. Co-founder of SAGE, a psycho-spiritual program for elders, she has helped guide a Tibetan Buddhist Center for seven years and has taught Eastern Spirituality and Practices, Imagery, Meditation, and Women’s Health at San Francisco State University for fourteen years. She guided Healing in Nature retreats in Hawaii and the Southwest and had a counseling practice for many years in Marin County in California.
Co-author, with Ole Nydahl, of Practical Buddhism: The Kagyu Path, Dr. Aronoff has edited five books and four meditation booklets on Tibetan Buddhism. She is the author of the textbook Compassionate Healing: Eastern Perspectives.
Dr. Aronoff’s poems have appeared in dozens of magazines, journals, and anthologies.
Carol Alena Aronoff on Facebook
The Gift of Not Finding: Poems by Carol Alena Aronoff • August 3, 2020 • Poetry • Trade Paper • $16.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-5-6 • 126 Pages
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PUSHING THE LIMITS
A BOUND COLLECTION OF BOUNDLESS POEMS
BY KENNETH LYON
Ken Lyon’s work is a personal dive into the heart of a poet who thinks and feels deeply. Whether sharing details of his own life or considering the world stage, Lyon offers a rich frame of reference. I am led down intriguing and unfamiliar paths to what I immediately recognize as truth. And what a grand journey it is—often laced with humor and wordplay, always passionately engaging and challenging.
~ Barbara Osicka, Desert Poets
A bold and evocative collection of more than 60 poems, Pushing the Limits is Kenneth Lyon’s second collection. Lyon began writing poems after a long career in education, at the dawn of his eighties, and today is producing memorable contemporary poems rich with wisdom and in the voice of an important Elder.
Pushing the Limits comprises three sections — At First Sight, On Second Thought, and At Peace — that together progress as life does, from early beginnings to maturity. Focusing on themes of resilience, risk, and transformation with unflinching honesty, Lyon’s poems range from quiet reflections on identity and aging, to family, to food, to portraits of love, loss, and renewal, all taking their readers beyond their comfort zones to confront what awaits them. Some of the poems are fun, others somber; some disturbing, perhaps even perplexing, others depicting what no words can describe.
A poet of personal witness who lives his life as “a work in progress,” Lyon uses various poetic forms, rhyme schemes, and structures, including a villanelle, a sonnet, a ghazal, a rondeau, a sestina, and a haiku, as he develops a vision of what life is and can be. With vivid imagery and often striking language, Lyon transforms the mundane into what is relatable and inspirational, something profound and, as the title of a poem at the heart of the collection makes clear, “always under construction.”
Pushing the Limits by Kenneth Lyon • November 10, 2025 • Poetry • Trade Paper • $17.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-44-5 • 156 Pages • EBook • $9.00 • ISBN:978-1-950475-45-2 • 133 Pages
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A DANCE HORIZONTAL
POEMS BY KENNETH LYON
At a time when many published poets seem unsure about what they have to say, Lyon’s humble self-confidence and self-awareness are restorative.
~ Robert McDowell
Retired from a long career in education and at first isolated in a pandemic bubble in the desert with his wife, poet Kenneth Lyon cultivated the desire and discipline to write daily. The collection described here, Lyon’s first poetry collection, contains more than a hundred poems organized into three sections: I – Future Archives and the Resurrection of Extinct Thoughts, II — Form Maladies, and III – A Dance Horizontal.
Section I contains poems mostly, but not entirely, from the poet’s past, including his childhood in Manhattan, summer camp in the Berkshires, schooling, the 1960’s, Jewish life, family, college teaching in Beijing, politics, and ventriloquism (he was a vent for five years after retiring).
Section II explores a variety of themes similar to the previous section, except that almost all the poems are written in specific poetic forms. For example, this section contains sonnets, elegies, blank verse, sestinas, an epistle, an ode, a double acrostic, a villanelle, a cinquain, a haiku, a diamante, a pantoum, limericks, and found and concrete poetry.
Section III is more romantic, the poet’s version of love poems.
Read Robert McDowell’s Introduction to A Dance Horizontal:
The Author: Kenneth Lyon, Ph.D., was born in New York City on December 9, 1947. He graduated from Clarkson University with a bachelor’s in science degree in mathematics; The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars with a master’s degree in creative writing poetry; and the University of Denver with a doctorate in creative writing fiction.
Dr. Lyon was an educator for forty-five years, teaching in Maryland, Vermont, Denver, Aspen, Beijing, and Washington. He received a Principal Credential from the Danforth Program at the University of Washington and a Superintendent Credential form Seattle Pacific University. Dr. Lyon also was a school principal for fifteen years, a central office director, and a Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying Compliance Officer.
Following retirement, Dr. Lyon continued his anti-bullying work as a ventriloquist. With his figure Byron Stander, he presented at schools, clubs, organizations, and the International Ventriloquist Society Annual Convention.
Dr. Lyon’s publications include the short story “My Rock and My Redeemer” in The Denver Quarterly; “When Schizoaffective Disorder Lurks in the House” in Kindred Republic”; and “To Get a Shot or Not?” and “The Widow Channel” in News & Views. During the Vietnam War Era, Dr. Lyon was a conscientious objector. He has always valued world peace, and with Ukrainian ancestry (Kyiv and Odessa), he is especially anguished about the Russia Ukraine War, which began with Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022.
A Dance Horizontal: Poems by Kenneth Lyon • November 10, 2023 • Poetry • Trade Paper • $15.81 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-32-2 • 264 Pages
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It All Started in the Garden of Eden
A TALE OF TWO SOULS
BY SHAI HAR-EL
This lyrical narrative is about discovering purpose in life. An artfully poetic story narrated by Har-El, a trustworthy guide to achieving greater understanding and acceptance, A Tale of Two Souls helps readers answer such questions as: Are we all born with a divine “mission”? How do we investigate, and where? How do we find purpose and meaning every day while also confronting life’s surprises and challenges, advances and reversals. For anyone of any spiritual or religious practice, A Tale of Two Souls show us how to engage fully with life.
A Tale of Two Souls by Shai Har-El • March 15, 2022 • Philosophy • Trade Paper • $15.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-21-6 • 58 Pages
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A Poet of Love, Spirituality, and Mysticism
RIDING THE WAVES OF BLISS
SEASONS OF LIFE POEMS BY SHAI HAR-EL
Shai Har-El’s poems follow the arc of his extraordinary life, beginning with growing up in Israel, blossoming in a multi-faceted love for and intimacy with a Beloved, the central figure of the poet’s life for more than fifty years (Rosie, the poet’s late wife), expanding into questions of global oneness and harmony, experiencing spiritual awakening and illumination, and ending where life in this realm concludes, in death and grieving.
Readers of all ages and nationalities will identify with Har-El’s lyricism and clear-eyed presentation of all he sees and feels. The diligence of his spiritual practice and long odyssey waft through the poems like the susurrus in dancing trees. The epic love story at the heart of this collection is poignant, empathetic, and inspiring, transcending time “like a petalled rose emerging from one stem offering its sweet fragrance and infinite beauty to humanity.”
The Author: Shai Har-El, Ph.D., is a scholar, educator, rabbi, writer, poet, activist, and businessman. He was born and raised in Israel, where he served in the Israeli army and participated in the Six Day War (1967), the War of Attrition (1969-1970), and the Yom Kippur War (1973). A resident of Illinois, Har-El manages his full-service financial consulting firm, Har-El Financial Group, and directs the Middle East Peace Network (MEPN), a private global diplomacy organization.
Dr. Har-El also lectures, conducts workshops, and writes essays on current Middle East affairs and a variety of religious themes. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Middle Eastern history from Tel Aviv University and a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago.
He is the author of Struggle for Domination in the Middle East: The Ottoman-Mamluk War, 1485-1491 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), Where Islam and Judaism Join Together: A Perspective on Reconciliation (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2014), and In Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace: An Urgent Call for a New Approach to Middle East Peace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). The last two books are the fruits of his peace advocacy and activism under MEPN.
Dr. Har-El’s Discover the Jewel of Wisdom: Eight Paths to Powerful Living is the result of years of investment in studying, exploring, experiencing, and teaching self-mastery. His book is a “living laboratory” report of his personal discoveries while plowing the “fields” of life and his spiritual journey toward rabbinic ordination. His anthology, Many Ways to Courting God: Selected Spiritual Writings, and his daily spiritual guide, Daily Spiritual Affirmations for Powerful Living, are companion books.
Interview with Shai Har-el on YouTube
Foreword to Riding the Waves of Bliss by Shai Har-EL
The Greek philosopher Aristotle distinguishes between two disciplines, history and poetry. He suggests that history reports what happened and therefore is concerned with particulars, whereas poetry is more philosophical and concerned with universals. I agree. My poetry is an authentic presentation of my inner world, and, unlike history, the study of which I have been dedicating my life to for many years, it is not subject to all the constrains and imperfections of actual life. I believe my poems, though autobiographical and personal, can appeal to anyone; the personal story in my poetry may illuminate your story because it tells the truth, my truth and yours. I described this kind of truth in one of my poems, portraying it “like a petalled rose emerging from one stem offering its sweet fragrance and infinite beauty to humanity.
With age comes better knowledge and a wider experience of life. Walking you through the seasons of my life, my poems start with a deep yearning and longing to the beginning, growing up in Israel; they continue through the experience of my multi-faceted love for an intimacy with mu beloved wife, Rosie of blessed memory, the central figure in my life for over 50 years; they shift to my preoccupation with the questions of oneness and harmony in the world; they go through the period of my spiritual awakening and illumination; and they finally end where life in This World concludes, in death and grieving.
Riding the Waves of Bliss: Seasons of Life Poems by Shai Har-El • October 25, 2020 • Poetry • Trade Paper • $15.12 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-8-7 • 152 Pages
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A Novel That Takes Readers on a Quest to Heal
SECRETS OF THE TREES
A NOVEL BY ALISSA LUKARA
What if the trauma of ancestors we have never met can still haunt our lives today? The field of epigenetics reveals how past traumas are passed on in DNA to future generations. Alissa Lukara’s novel, Secrets of the Trees, explores one woman’s quest to heal the impact of this phenomenon in a story set in Latvia in 2003, thirteen years after the nonviolent “Singing Revolution” freed the country from fifty years of Soviet rule.
Nikkie, a twenty-two-year-old dancer performing at the Hollywood Bowl, is about to become a star until she’s sent reeling by the vision of a girl and her parents being shot in a forest in 1940s Latvia. Knowing she will not be able to dance again until she solves the mystery of the vision, Nikkie goes on a quest to Latvia, the land of her ancestors, to uncover the secrets hidden in the trees of her vision and to find the father she has never met.
The world-famous Latvian Song and Dance Festival is about to take place. Latvia is in the midst of a renaissance but also lives in the shadow of the residual trauma from Soviet oppression. Nikkie discovers Latvians’ mystical soul connection to nature and trees, and the unifying power of their mass choir singing and dancing. She confronts how her ancestors’ resilience in the face of challenge has shaped her own life and how helping the dead of her vision could heal them and free her to fulfill her own dreams.
The Author: Alissa Lukara is a first-generation American. Her family escaped Latvia during World War II to avoid deportation to Siberia; they were refugees for five years. Lukara traveled to Latvia three times to research her novel.
Lukara’s memoir, Riding Grace: A Triumph of the Soul (Silver Light Publications, 2006), was called by Midwest Book Review “a transcendental story about the immeasurable powers of redemption and compassion. Night Dancin’ (Ballantine Books), a co-authored pop culture overview of New York City discoes, is a collector’s item.
A professional writer and writing coach for more than thirty years, she blogs at Transformational Writers with Alissa Lukara, teaches workshops, and speaks on writing as a transformational journey.
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Secrets of the Trees by Alissa Lukara • October 23, 2019 • Fiction • Trade Paper • $17.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-3-2 • 342 Pages
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EMILY & VIRGINIA
A NOVEL BY ROBERT MCDOWELL
An extraordinary novel! Robert McDowell’s book is deeply intelligent, devoted, poetic and timeless, a fantasy so real you can taste it. Woven from meticulous research of the mind and heart, this meeting of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf is a gem. McDowell knows these women, two brilliant artists, each “irreverent, a pistol painfully shy.
~ Barbara Dana, Author of A Voice of Her Own: Becoming Emily Dickinson and Young Joan
Readers in the know will notice that Robert McDowell’s novel Emily & Virginia follows the structure of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse but the story is utterly new.
Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson team up in this evolved magical realism tale to journey from the Afterlife to Ashland, Oregon, in 2021. Their goal is to guide 25-year-old Lily Ramsay, Manga artist, through her coming-of-age crises and save her from the terrifying De la Nuit, dark agents from the Other World who intend to do Ramsay eternal harm.
Woolf and Dickinson become Lily’s eccentric “aunts,” protecting and mentoring her in life, work, and love. The dynamic between the iconic writers will charm and delight readers who already love them, delivering on a divine pairing that until now one could only dream of.
McDowell excels at evoking the voices and physical presences of Woolf and Dickinson as they defend and support their young charges, battle Afterlife enemies, and become matchmakers for Lily and the young man she meets (he happens to “have a thing” for Virginia’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell). Emily’s sister Lavinia, Vanessa, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group appear in this tale, aiding their Afterlife cohorts in their project. Readers may especially appreciate the appearance of Leonard Woolf and his pet monkey Mitz.
Virginia Woolf was four-years-old in 1886 when Emily Dickinson died. The two never met . . . until now. McDowell delivers one of the most satisfying, unexpected, and entertaining team-ups of literary stars in the history of American and English literature.
Emily & Virginia is a love letter to two amazing women and a compelling coming-of-age tale of a talented artist from a new-and-now generation.
Emily & Virginia by Robert McDowell • September 21, 2021 • Fiction • Hardcover • $34.00 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-10-7 • Trade Paper • $16.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-11-7 • 278 Pages
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About the Author & the Writing of Emily & Virginia
Robert McDowell ran away from his San Gabriel Valley home when he was 7 to reach England. Why? To meet Virginia Woolf’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell.
“I didn’t get far,” says McDowell. “I planned to walk and hitch rides to San Pedro, where I’d been taken deep-sea fishing a couple of times. I knew boats would be there and I thought maybe I could sneak aboard a tramp steamer bound for England (I discovered tramp steamers in a movie).”
McDowell’s mother picked him up at the entrance to the 605 exchange near Arcadia. He was grounded for a week, maybe two. Or three. It was a long time, the author reports, until he felt he was no longer under intense surveillance.
Vanessa Bell died in England the day before McDowell’s 8th birthday. There would be no meeting the beautiful painter and closest childhood confidante of her sister Virginia.
McDowell had already experienced visitations — some might call them hauntings — from Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. The two women, dead 20 and 75 years, respectively, in 1961, sat on his bed and talked to him and to each other. Because he precociously loved them, the child did not think this strange. He was already a believer in Familiars, and soon his two Authors showed up everywhere — in his secret thicket cave on the grounds of the Ramona Convent (where he read for the first time some of Virginia’s novels and Emily’s poems), at Marguerita Elementary School and Alhambra High School, at sporting events (Virginia attended more than Emily), stores, and libraries. Virginia never showed up at dental appointments because she’d had too many teeth pulled, and Emily avoided eye exams. Both could become irritated when the author’s mother took him in tow to shop for clothes but both loved recitations, sing-alongs, and romps in the woods.
The visits between worlds have continued throughout the author’s life but they took on a different focus sometime in 2014. Gradually, McDowell realized that his Authors were instructing him and encouraging him to write a novel — this novel — about them teaming up and intervening in the life of a conflicted young woman. At times, it almost felt as if the Poet and Novelist, exacting, entertaining editors both, were delivering whole passages and poems through the channel between them and their younger charge Robert. The process took a bit more than five years and eleven versions before all were satisfied. The result is this Emily & Virginia. May you delight in it as much as “They” did creating it for you.
SWEET WOLF
SELECTED & NEW POEMS BY ROBERT McDOWELL
Introduction by Chad Abushanab
It is quite fantastic that a poet with such a strong sense of narrative can slip so easily into these moments of pure music, where sense is almost (but not quite) beyond grasp, lost in the sound. And, I believe, ultimately, this is what sets Robert McDowell apart from many of the narrative poets that precede him and, indeed, his contemporaries. There is mystery that emerges from in between the certainties. In the poetry of Robert McDowell, no story is without its song, the thing that compels us forward beyond the sense of the thing into the feeling of it, that resonance of which the poet speaks in Poetry & Literacy:
What sound can they make
But an untranslatable
Buzzing in God’s ear?
~ Excerpt from Chad Abushanab’s Introduction to Sweet Wolf
The Author: Robert McDowell is the publisher of Homestead Lighthouse Press (HLP) and the author of the novel Emily & Virginia (Homestead Lighthouse Press, 2021). He is a poet, performer, social activist for the advancement of women and women’s rights, storyteller, public speaker, educator, editor, and author of more than 20 books, including Poetry as a Spiritual Practice (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2016) and Selected and New Poems (Homestead Lighthouse Press, 2021). McDowell’s poems, stories, nonfiction, blog content, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of anthologies and periodicals, including Best American Poetry, Poetry, The New Criterion, London Magazine, Sewanee Review, Poets & Writers, and The Hudson Review.
Over the course of a long career, McDowell has selected and guided into print more than 300 books by Pulitzer Prize winners, a Nobel Laureate, five U.S. Poets Laureate, and intermediate and beginning writers. A lifelong mentor of emerging poets and writers, McDowell especially champions women in print, literacy, and women’s rights.
McDowell cofounded, with Mark Jarman and Lysa McDowell), and served for 22years as publisher of Story Line Press, the archives of which reside at Stanford University.
Sweet Wolf: Selected & New Poems by Robert McDowell • May 15, 2021 • Poetry • Hardcover • $24.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-12-4 • 296 Pages • Trade Paper • $16.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-13-1 • 296 Pages
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