About the Author and Her Debut Chapbook:
Rusted Bells and Daisy Baskets
Eliot said, “all time is eternally present,” and Andrea Panzeca proves it with an atomic bang or maybe a rocket blast into the heavens. In these delirious poems she marries a jazzy present with memory and dreams and comes up with a wild poetic cocktail that will make you word drunk and ready to take off to places unknown. A glorious debut!
—Barbara Hamby
Andrea Panzeca’s Rusted Bells and Daisy Baskets concerns territories in flux — the coasts of Louisiana and Florida and the liminal spaces of memory and dream. The book is an elegy
for pre-Katrina New Orleans and the poet’s father. While the debut’s dramatic situation invokes the Southern Gothic tradition, its readers encounter a distinctive way of seeing this
world. But it is the unsettling imagery, consummate sonics, the fierce conscience of Panzeca’s book that brings us the “news that stays news.”
—Carolyn Hembree, author of Rigging a Chevy into a Time
Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague and Skinny
Andrea Panzeca earned an MFA in Creative Writing at University of New Orleans and a BA in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Her awards include the Carol Gelderman Award for Nonfiction Thesis in 2015, the Andrea Saunders Gereighty/Academy of American Poets Poetry Award in 2013, and the UNO Vassar Miller Poetry Award in 2013 and 2012. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Ellipsis and her scholarly essay Naturalism and the Florida Setting in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston appeared in Excavatio. She was an associate nonfiction editor at Bayou Magazine and a panelist discussing comics at the Other Words Conference in 2015. She attended Home School Miami in 2016 and grew up on Merritt Island, FL. Currently, she is training to become a Louisiana Master Naturalist in New Orleans.
For more on Andrea and her work, visit: http://www.andreapanzeca.com