About
Petra Whitaker writes from Southern California. She lived in Oregon and then Chicago while finishing her master's degree. Former contributing editor of Red Box Kite, and Family Times Magazine, she served as a poetry editor of U.C. Riverside's Arts and Literary Journal, Mosaic. Petra received her bachelor's degree from the University of California, Riverside, and her master's degree from UC Riverside's Palm Desert Creative Writing Program: Writing for the Performing Arts.
Publications
It Began With a Poem About Alzheimer's
Years ago, when my grandmother was suffering dementia/Alzheimer's disease, I wrote a poem about this debilitating disorder and the difficult symptoms that accompany it. The poem led to another poem about Alzheimer's, and then to other poems about other disorders. I ended up with a stack of disorder poems and wasn't sure what I was going to do with them. I decided not to compile them into a manuscript but to send them out individually, when I came across a call for submissions by Editor David Fraser for an anthology of poems related to (of all things) disorders. I sent a number of the poems off, and two were selected: "Lewy Bodies" the Alzheimer's poem, and "Vertigo." Both poems appear in this lovely book titled, As One Cradles Pain.
Fault Lines
My poem "Another Santa Ana" found a home in Fault Lines Poetry, an anthology of poems by West Coast poets. Read the poem here.
West on an Unnamed Road
Want to read my thesis?
West on an Unnamed Road is my thesis (published in 2011), a collection of poetry. Many of these poems were assignments, imitations, experiments. Some were revisions of poems that I had written ten years earlier. This was me fumbling around in the dark. I still am. Click here to download .pdf. |
