Gretchen Fletcherpublishes poetry chapbook

The Scent of Oranges: poems from the tropics, a poetry chapbook by upstreet poet Gretchen Fletcher (“Recitation in Clover,” upstreet number three) has been released by Finishing Line Press. The poems in the collection are set in South Florida, and were inspired by the flora and fauna of that area.

Gretchen’s poems have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, Pacific Coast Journal, Northeast Corridor, Inkwell, Pudding Magazine, and other journals. They have also been anthologized in Poetic Voices Without Borders, Open Windows 2005, Sincerely Elvis, You Are Here: New York Streets in Poetry, and Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge: Poems About Marriage. She received the grand prize in San Francisco’s Artists Embassy International Dancing Poetry Festival, and first honorable mention in Canada’s lichen literary journal Serial Poet competition. She was a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and a juried poet at the Houston Poetry Fest.

In 2008, Gretchen was a winner in the first-ever national contest for poetry inspired by Times Square, “Bright Lights/ Big Verse: Poems of Times Square,” and read her winning poem, “Two Giant Men in New York,” in Times Square on June 23. This competition, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America and the Times Square Alliance, selected five winners from a pool of close to 700 entrants. Besides the trip to New York to read her poem, she received a prize of $1,000.

Gretchen grew up in Palm Beach and attended the University of Miami. A resident of Fort Lauderdale, she leads poetry and creative nonfiction workshops for Florida Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress. You may visit her on the web at Open Art Space.