Poetry and Friendship as a Catalyst for Survival and Healing with DEBORAH and ELIZABETH

Today we are joined by Deborah Tobola and Elizabeth Buckner who have been friends for close to 25 years, brought together by being teachers at the same prison and a shared love of poetry. Both from California with unique backgrounds including living during the hippie era, they share their individual stories and traumas they've endured through the years, sharing poems they've written along the way, and how writing and sharing poetry with each other has been a catalyst for healing.

 

We loved this soulful conversation and know you'll be fascinated, touched, and inspired by Deborah and Elizabeth's poems, stories, passion for serving others, social justice, and friendship, as we were. 

 

More about Deborah and Elizabeth and where to find their work (with links):

 

Deborah Tobola is a poet, memoirist, playwright and co-author of a children’s book. Her work has earned four Pushcart Prize nominations, three Academy of American Poets awards and a Children’s Choice Book Award. Her memoir, Hummingbird in Underworld:Teaching in a Men’s Prison (She Writes Press, 2019), received positive reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. It also won several awards in the categories of social justice, social issues, creative nonfiction and heroic journeys. Tobola spent 30 years working as prison arts instructor, teaching creative writing and theatre. Tobola founded Poetic Justice Project, the country’s first theatre company for formerly incarcerated people, in Santa Maria, California in 2009. 

 

Before dedicating herself to poetry, Elizabeth Buckner was a welfare worker in Los Angeles and San Francisco for four years and a prison educator in San Luis Obispo County for thirty years, with a stint in San Francisco as a substitute school bus driver in between. Her poems are her life stories written in shorthand, distilled to their essences. She has self-published two books of poetry, Naked Lady in 2012, and Spirits in 2016. She recently re-published an expanded version of, Naked Lady, A Poetic Memoir of Rape and Recovery. Both books are available on Amazon Kindle and Apple Books.

 

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