Description
Poetry. DAYS OF BLUE AND FLAME by 101-year-old Sarah Yerkes investigates subjects closest to the author's heart—childhood, family, travel, aging, art. After a career as a sculptor and a landscape architect, Yerkes began writing poetry at age 97. "I never fully understood how satisfying it could be to shape, build and form a piece with words rather than with wood, aluminum, stone and iron pipe," she said. A hard-working artist, Yerkes strives to write sometimes difficult poems with courage. Poet David Keplinger, winner of the 2019 UNT Rilke Award, said, "Yerkes sews a pre-nuclear America to the computer age, and she leaves space enough for our own pages, and our children's pages, all the stories yet to come."
Author Bio
Sarah Hitchcock Yerkes was born in 1918 in Portland, Oregon, where her father had been sent to remove giant spruce trees from the Northwest forests to make WWI airplane propellers. Once the war ended, the family returned to their home in Cleveland, where Sarah grew up. Sarah studied at the Boston Museum School, the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and was one of the first women to complete a degree in architecture from Harvard. Since 1945, Sarah has lived in Washington DC. In addition to her professional life as a landscape architect and sculptor, she was a student, a trustee for over fifteen years, and interim dean at the Corcoran Galleries and Museum. In her mid-nineties, Sarah turned seriously to poetry when she joined a poetry workshop at her retirement community, Ingleside at Rock Creek. She is mother to three, grandmother to nine, and great grandmother to thirteen children.
Author City: WASHINGTON, DC USA