About the Author

In 1995, as a middle-aged undergraduate at North Carolina State University, Pete Solet broke a decades-long fast from poetry and literature and enrolled in a entry-level poetry writing class with noted African-American poet Professor Gerald Barrax, whose encouragement and dedication, evidenced in that and later classes, were inspirational. More than twenty years later, Solet continues to write poetry, as well as short fiction. A slow learner, it took him thirty years to earn a Bachelors degree, in interdisciplinary studies, during which time he had a four-year affair with journalism, drove a cab in Boston, repaired Saabs, was an administrative assistant at a psychiatric rehab, and worked for a pediatric hematologist/oncologist at Duke Medical Center. After graduating, he spent more than a decade monitoring clinical research studies. A long-term attendee at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, hes taken workshops there with poets Carolyn Forche, Marilyn Nelson, Andrew Hudgins, and Dan Tobin, among others. In the Great Smokies Writing Program his workshop leaders have included Elizabeth Luytens, Bonnie Soniat, Laura Hope-Gill. A class with Holly Iglesias at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, gave him a firm grounding in the relationship between poetry and key historical events in matters of race and class. When he was a youngster, Solet attended a reading by Langston Hughes at a local library, which planted a seed that became a deep interest in the poets life and work. He considers Hughes his most enduring influence. Solet retired in 2008. Besides writing, he procures firewood for the woodstove he shares with his wife, Katherine, hikes, runs his walk-behind tractor, and talks about cars to anyone wholl listen. His poetry and fiction have been published in several journals, including the Asheville Poetry Review, Ars Medica, and the Great Smokies Review, and he is on the editorial staff of the Smoky Blue Literature and Arts Magazine. He was brought up in a Jewish/Marxist home but in 2002, he joined the Catholic Church and promptly became a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, serving the poor. He also has volunteered as a Guardian ad Litem, representing the wishes of abused and neglected children entangled in the court system. He moved to North Carolina with Katherine in 1989, and has lived near Asheville since 1999. His three children and two grandchildren live in New England.