Regina O'Melveny
Regina O'Melveny is a writer, assemblage artist, and teacher. Her poetry and prose have been anthologized and widely published in liteary magazines such as The Jacaranda Review, Yellow Silk, Poetry/LA, The Sun, The LA Weekly, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, and The Wild Duck Review. In 1995 she won first place in the John Foster West National Poetry Award Contest, judged by Marge Piercy. She has been awarded writers' residency fellowships by the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in California and the Cummington Community of the Arts in Massachusetts. She lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, California
“...it was my father who had taught me to love books for themselves, the smell of the vellum and paper, the rare authority of the pages. "Here, do you see this marvelous book, the skins of 182 sheep," he once pronounced as he slapped his hand down on the stamped leather cover boards. "The book is a flock, a jewel, a cemetery, a lantern, a garden, a piss pot; pigments ground of precious minerals, charred bone, lamp soot, rare plants and insects. Pigments formed at the corrosion of copper plates suspended above urine.”
Regina O'Melveny
“I've since come to believe that the world is populated by multitudes of women sitting at windows, inseparable from their surroundings. I myself spent many hours at a window on the Zattere, waiting for my father's return, waiting for my life to appear like one of those great ships that came into the harbor, broad sails filled with the wind of providence...I'd grown transparent as the glass through which I peered, dangerously invisible even to myself. It was then I knew I must set my life in motion or I would disappear.”
Regina O'Melveny