For Readers

Nonfiction

Playing for Equality  (McFarland Publishing, 2016)

The right to participate in sports and competitive athletics is more than an issue of fair play—it’s a human right. In 1972, Title IX of the Education Amendments became law, transforming sports opportunities for girls and women in the U.S.  This book chronicles Title IX’s passage and implementation through the stories of eight women physical educators, coaches, Olympic athletes, and administrators. They recall the experience of being female in the mid–20th century, their influential teachers and mentors, and their work to create recreation, sport, and athletic opportunity. Their narratives reveal gender, race, and class inequity in higher education and athletics and describe how women leaders worked through sports to make women’s rights human rights.

Available at McFarland Books .

Poetry

The Feast Delayed (Terrapin Books, 2021)

This beautiful and fraught book is born from a closely observed life, one rich in compassion for the natural and human worlds, for the blessings and violences we do to one another. Beneath the details is a yearning that we’ll learn to care for each other more, that we’ll see the life-giving connections that always surround us. LeBlanc is a poet whose pen can offer the quiet light of the moon to guide us.

     — Todd Davis, Native Species and Winterkill

To undergo metamorphosis is to change form by natural, supernatural, or, in the case of the poems in Diane LeBlanc’s The Feast Delayed, poetic means. It is to eat death on the roadside. To assemble a widow’s kit with a corkscrew and a silver bowl of ash. Over and over, in strange and exacting metaphors, the poet reconsolidates grief into something cavernous and sometimes kind: “In a world sinking under the weight of a caged blue fox, /wind borrows an umbrella and returns a wet petunia.” It is one thing to find poignancy in roses or moonlight. It is quite another to discover it in a mannequin, the burning of Notre Dame, an albino snake, a truck loaded with ears of corn, and the placing of a phonograph arm in a record’s grooves. These poems find a way into my deepest ear, sibyl-like, offering beauty, humor, drama, and, yes, consolation.

                     — Melissa Kwasny, Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today

“No one wants to be lost forever. Just long enough,” Diane LeBlanc writes. The poems in The Feast Delayed crave the fabric of home and ease. They seed within the natural world that lives beside us, and in the rich and mysterious “time when / we didn’t belong to each other alone.” LeBlanc pinwheels her attention to the landscape, waking us with her beautiful phrases. And she focuses, too, on the gravity of grief. These poems nest in it, but also emerge to travel through the repeating reminders of light and the aviary of seasons, history and the horizon of love.

                    — Lauren Camp, Took House 

Cover Art: Molly Keenan, RetroFutures Designs

Available at Content (Northfield, MN), Next Chapter Bookstore (Barre, VT); Terrapin Books; Amazon, Barnes and Noble

 

This Space for Message  (Seven Kitchens Press, 2017)

These poems are dedicated to Wyoming, where I lived from 1986 to 2000. They document separation from love and place. Memory retreats from and re-enters the vast landscape of the West, at times landing in the finite space allowed for words on vintage postcards.

 

 

 

Cover photo: Guillermo Filice Castro

Available at Seven Kitchens Press 

 

Sudden Geography (Finishing Line Press, 2014)

In the painterly and gorgeously wrought poems of Sudden Geography, Diane LeBlanc gracefully navigates a passionate spectrum between presence and absence: a bright salamander taking temporary refuge within the frill of a rhubarb leaf; a sunflower neck minus its yellow head; the mint patch holding the shape of a beloved dog now gone; a gift of tulips drying and scattering on a lost friend’s grave; attentiveness to small quotidian beauties in the face of inevitable flux and transformative uncertainties. These poems chart their own circadian rhythms with thoughtful compassion and fierce splendor—the wintry loveliness of despair a palimpsest, or fulcrum, upon which swings the memory of cardinals, the bitter promise of fiddleheads, or the dream of a moose in a field of columbine.

          –Lee Ann Roripaugh, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year

Diane LeBlanc is a poet who has both hands firmly in the earth. And so the poems in Sudden Geography come to us fresh, local and organically grown. From the Far West back to the Midwest, the trajectory of these surprising poems can encompass a world at war through a close examination of what lies right before us, as yet undiscovered. This third chapbook from LeBlanc deserves to be read and reread until its sweet poetic nourishment becomes a part of your body.

           –Derick Burleson, Melt

Cover Art by Jan Shoger
“Nature’s Calligraphy II”
2006
18.75″ x 18.75″
woodcut

Please contact Diane LeBlanc for ordering information.

Dancer with Good Sow (Finishing Line Press, 2008)

Dancer with Good Sow is a dense and remarkable gathering of poems.  Diane LeBlanc’s many gifts as poet are revealed as she makes indelible art from her unsparing, generous memory.  Here are portraits of family life presented with gravity and intention–we have not read these images before, we didn’t know this family, its ways of loving, and suffering, until now.  We see a history through LeBlanc’s brilliant and tough-minded images. We see how her narratives link to emotional truths lived and pondered in this beautifully shaped collection of poems. A whole, complicated world is ours now, thanks to LeBlanc’s wisdom, and heart.

          –Deborah Keenan, Author of Willow Room, Green Door. 

Available at Amazon.com, and Finishing Line Press .

Hope in Zone Four (Talent House Press, 1998)

Hope in Zone Four is a collection of poems about leaving home and family in Vermont to settle in Laramie, Wyoming. The speaker of these poems is a twenty-something writer and gardener determined to create during periods of devastating loss. Always hopeful, she dances in the bean patch to conjure rain.

Please contact Diane LeBlanc for ordering information.

 

 

 

 

Book Contributions

Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts. Eds. Kaethe Schwehn and L. DeAne Lagerquist. (Oxford University Press, 2014)

The essays in this volume exemplify the reflective practices at the heart of liberal arts, for faculty and students alike. Martin E. Marty once said that “The vocation of St. Olaf is vocation,” and the contributors draw on their experiences teaching in a range of departments-from biology and economics to history and religion-to reflect on both their calling as professors and their practices for fostering students’ ability to identify their own vocations. These scholars’ varied notions of how vocation is best understood and cultivated reveal the differing religious commitments and pedagogical practices present within their college community. Together they demonstrate how the purposes of their own lives intersect creatively with the purposes of higher education and the needs of their students and the world.  (from Oxford University Press)

Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing (The Key Publishing House, 2012)

“Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing is like a good conversation with writer-friends who share their experiences and help you think about your own approach to writing and publishing. If you want to preserve your family history for future generations, write a memoir, or just explore your own family’s stories, this book is full of accessible and useful suggestions.”

—Ellen Bass, poet and faculty in the Pacific University MFA program; TheHuman Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)

 “This extraordinary collection of insightful, well-written essays will serve splendidly as both guidebook and motivator for any woman who is writing seriously and living her life fully. Matters as diverse as family dynamics, realistic time-management, marketing strategies—even ways of writing more effectively—are covered here with great sensitivity and common sense.”

 —Marilyn L. Taylor, Ph.D., Wisconsin Poet Laureate, 2009-2010; Going Wrong (Parallel Press, 2009)

Just as every place has a story, so does every family. Women Writing on Family gives you the essentials on writing, teaching and publishing about family. Real, detailed advice from women who know. If you want to share your family stories, this book is not to be missed.”

—Chris Helvey, author of Purple Adobe and Editor-in-Chief of Trajectory

“Family is what creates us, sustains us, bedevils us, confuses us, loves us, destroys us, and defines us. For writers–particularly women writers–family is also a rich vein of subject matter that can be both nourishing and overwhelming, often at the same time. This volume examines a wide variety of family-related issues from points of view that range from the practical to the philosophical, but all focused on how they impact women who write.”

 —Eleanor Lerman, author of The Sensual World Re-Emerges (Sarabande Books, 2010) and Janet Planet (Mayapple, 2011), among other volumes

“This is a comprehensive work that belongs on any nonfiction writer’s bookshelf. Not only does it address the legal and emotional costs that come with the challenge of writing about family, it offers insights into how one can nurture a rewarding writing career in conjunction with a demanding day job and family obligations.”

—Jennifer Tang, New York City librarian and freelance writer for Newsweek, L.A. Times, and Fitness magazine

Now available at Amazon.com and The Key Publishing House