Donna Spruijt-Metz is professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. She has been a professional flutist, a rabbinical school candidate, but she is ever mostly a poet. She lived in the Netherlands for 22 years and translates Dutch poetry to English. Her poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as the Copper Nickel, RHINO, The Cortland Review, The Tahoma Review, and Poetry Northwest. She is the author of two chapbooks — Slippery Surfaces (Finishing Line Press) and And Haunt the World (with co-author Flower Conroy, forthcoming from Ghost City Press).
Once, Flower Conroy made a list of last lines of Emily Dickinson poems. She thought they would make beguiling titles — that we could both work on 'Emily' poems — exchange them with each other. Sometimes an E.D. last line inspired a poem. But other times, a poem that was already partially written was attracted to a particular E.D. last line as a title, and that whirled the poem into new territory. It became a luxuriant exchange—Flower and I passed the poems back and forth again and again. In fact, it often grew to be unclear to either of us who wrote what. At MacDowell, Spruijt-Metz collaborated with Conroy on a full manuscript of these interwoven poems.
