Shakespeare's Shorts: Juditha Dowd, poet

“It is my belief that we would not know John James Audubon today if it weren’t for [Lucy].”

For our third installment of F***ing Shakespeare Shorts, Juditha Dowd reads from her gorgeously soft-spoken collection, Audubon’s Sparrow. The collection is a biography-in-poems that lyrically imagines the interiority and emotions of Lucy Bakewell, the wife of the artist and naturalist John James Audubon. We also have a chat with Juditha about the empathic power of stepping into another’s shoes, and what it means the tell the stories of women who are too easily lost in historical records. This is a really owlsome episode, folks! 

Audubon’s Sparrow: A Biography-in-Poems was released on May 19th from Rose Metal Press. You can order it here.  

Honorable Mentions:

• The National Audubon Society (of course!)

• John James Audubon: The Making of an American by Richard Rhodes

• German composer Heinrich Schütz

Judith is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Mango in Winter, as well as poetry chapbooks, short fiction, and lyric essays. She reads with the Cool Women ensemble in the New York-New Jersey-Philadelphia area and occasionally on the west coast. With her husband and two Maine Coon cats Juditha lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, near the Delaware River.

Find more of Judith’s work at her blog.