Pesha Joyce Gertler

After my mother’s death when I was seventeen months old, my father took me to Brooklyn where I grew up in an extended family of story tellers, poets, and dreamers who lured me into the magical world of language. As an imaginative, only child, poets and writers became my closest friends. From my immigrant grandmother, who could neither read nor write in English, I learned the power of language, how it can lock doors as well as open them. Out of this heritage, my love and respect for language grew, my appreciation of the music and power of words. This led to my writing and publishing my own poems and to evoking the poems and creative writing in others (primarily through teaching).