Aralee Strange, a poet and playwright, was born on December 5, 1943, in Macon, Georgia. At a young age she moved to Birmingham, Alabama. After living and working in Atlanta, Georgia, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City, New York, Aralee then settled for more than twenty years in Cincinnati, Ohio. In March 2007, she moved to Athens, Georgia, and lived there until her passing on June 15, 2013. Strange's body of work includes Etta Stone: A Film for Radio (1990), which she wrote, produced and edited at WGUC in Cincinnati and which was aired nationally on National Public Radio stations; dr. pain on main (1991), a play based on her series of poems by the same name, commissioned and produced by Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park; The Chronicles of Plague (1992), a play commissioned and produced by Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati; An Evening at the Sad Cafe (1995), directed scenes from her screenplay This Train, performed at Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati and at the Carnegie Arts Center, Covington, Kentucky; and This Train (1996-2001), a feature film she wrote, directed and edited. Throughout her lifetime, Strange also pioneered multiple open poetry readings and read regularly at regional venues. The last reading series Strange founded was Athens Word of Mouth, in Athens, Georgia; it began in 2009 and continues to this day. A sister reading series to Athens Word of Mouth, Word of Mouth Cincinnati, was founded in Strange's honor in January 2014, and is also ongoing. In April 2016, Strange's film This Train—the backbone of which was many of the poems in this manuscript—was central to a successful program at the Aronoff Center for the Arts titled "Present Tense Imperfect: Two Evenings of Spoken Word, Film, and Music."