Laura Budofsky Wisniewski
Here, the Sun
How Mushrooms Will Save the World
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
My maternal great grandmother was the healer for her shtetl. My grandfather, as a child–before he was sent alone to America–helped her gather leaves, bark and berries in the Belovezhskaya Forest of Belarus. This is my lineage.
Sometimes my great grandmother’s presence shows up to remind me that the natural world is animated with secrets, songs and powers, willing to teach us if we are willing to sacrifice our illusions of separation and hierarchy and move into mystery. When that happens, I try to write a poem, like these two poems in Plant-Human Quarterly.
Laura Budofsky Wisniewski is the author of Sanctuary, Vermont (Orison Books), which won the 2020 Orison Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. She is also author of the chapbook, How to Prepare Bear (Redbird Chapbooks). She won the Ruminate Magazine’s 2020 Janet B. Mccabe Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry International Prize, and the 2014 Passager Poetry Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry International, Missouri Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Image, Hunger Mountain Review, and other journals. Laura lives quietly in a small town in Vermont.