Linda McCauley Freeman
POET, TEACHER, AUTHOR, WRITER, CREATOR
Available for Readings & Workshops
UPCOMING WORKSHOPS 2025
Sept 25, 7-8:30pm POETS RESPOND (IN PERSON)
with poets Linda McCauley Freeman and Ted Millar
Do you have a drawer full of poems that you have never shown anyone or don’t know what to do with? Choose one to bring to this workshop for constructive feedback from two professional poets.
Registration required. Register here.
Sarah Hull Hallock Free Library, Milton, NY
UPCOMING READINGS 2025
July 18 @6-8pm
Fjord Winery in Milton NY
RAISING OUR VOICES
“The impulse to enter, with other humans, through language, into the order and disorder of the world, is poetic at its root as surely as it is political at its root.”
–Adrienne Rich
Protest Poetry Evening hosted by Ted Millar and Linda McCauley Freeman, sponsored by the Marlboro Democratic Committee.
Read your favorite protest poem or one of your own!
Donations to the Marlboro Democratic Committee are welcome, but not required.
Wines by the glass and food from the Fjord menu will be available.
Silent auction in support of the Marlboro Democratic Committee.
Sept 11 @ 7pm (IN PERSON & ON ZOOM)
Featured reader @ Bright Hill Literary Press, Treadwill NY
November 8 @ 2pm (IN PERSON & ON ZOOM)
Featured reader Woodstock Poetry Society , f
BOOKS
The Marriage Manual
(Backroom Window Press, 2024)
“Read the Marriage Manual and enter love in all its incarnations.”
–Darcy Smith, River Skin
The Family Plot
(Backroom Window Press, 2022)
“Honest and brave these poems chonicale a family’s wounds and a child’s survival.”
–Beth Copeland, Blue Honey
READ MY WORK!
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Featured USA Poet in THE POET MAGAZINE
THREE POEMS FOR A NEW WORLD in New World Writing Quarterly
IMAGINE SEEING in Headlight Review
THE THINGS I WOULD SAVE in Wordpeace
THE QUEEN TALKS TO HER MIRROR in Sunlight Press
IN PRINT:
“Blondie” and “Dagwood” and Dick Tracy” and Nancy Drew” and “Peanuts” all published in MOSS PIGLET
“STILL LIFE” in Tomorrow & Tomorrow Birth Issue, 2022
“Witness” in Popshot Quarterly
IN THE NEWS
My poem “Simmering” received honorable mention in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest 2024!
Check out an excerpt from my book featured on BLOOM
Reader Review:
“Linda McCauley Freeman has given us a poetic journey filled with intimate moments, sharp observations, and unforgettable imagery. Warm, wise, sometimes funny, often poignant, her narrative poems deftly marry craft and accessibility, as she chronicles both the bright and dark places of family life from youth to adulthood, never losing the thread of tenderness and compassion. A wonderful, satisfying read, and a truly impressive debut.”
THE FAMILY PLOT: Poems
Backroom Window Press, 2022
In this, her first full-length collection of poems, Linda McCauley Freeman tells the story of an American girlhood spent in a large and boisterous family that is sometimes dysfunctional, sometimes dangerous. The Family Plot is part memoir, part survival history, with plenty of space for a heroic portrait of the materfamilias, described in the title of one poem as “My Italian Catholic Human Rights Commissioner Mother” who even as she descends into dementia rises mightily from her chair. Rises mightily, one might add, in these poems as one focus of meaning amidst this rich complexity of personality over which the poet’s keen intelligence broods with an objectivity not devoid of kindness and deep affection. “I will remind her who she is/every time she forgets,” McCauley Freeman writes, and again, “It’s not that I can’t remember/her face, a kaleidoscope/of pictures. . . .”
BIO
Linda McCauley Freeman is the author of the full-length poetry collections The Marriage Manual (BWP, 2024) and The Family Plot (Backroom Window Press, 2022) and has been widely published in international journals, including in a Chinese translation. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2022. Recently she was the featured poet in The Poet Magazine, and appeared in Delta Poetry Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, and won Grand Prize in StoriArts’Maya Angelou poetry contest, and honorable mention in the 2024 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. Lines from one of her poems were selected by Kwame Alexander to use in his Civil Community Poem and are on display at the Civil Rights Memorial Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. She received a grant from Arts MidHudson and was selected for Poets Respond to Art 2020, 2021 2022 and 2024 shows. She was a three-time winner in the Talespinners Short Story contest judged by Michael Korda. She has an MFA from Bennington College and is the former poet-in-residence of the Putnam Arts Council. She lives in the Hudson Valley, NY, where she is also a swing dance teacher (www.got2lindy.com) and yoga instructor (www.blissbodyoga.com)
