Penguin Speakers Bureau

Frances Richey was born in Williamson, West Virginia in the heart of the coal fields in 1950. After graduating from the University of Kentucky, she worked in the business industry for nearly two decades. She has one child, Ben, whom she raised as a single mother since he was two years old.

When Ben was in high school, Richey realized she needed a new pursuit that would provide a deeper sense of meaning in her life than her corporate job and that would fill the void that would surely come when Ben left home for college. So, while continuing her nine-to-five job, she began volunteering at a hospice in New York City, teaching yoga to patients who were often in the last months or days of their lives. Each visit with a patient brought Richey closer to the reality of her mortality, and she soon started writing poems about her experience there. Before long, she realized that she could change her life in a fundamental way and spend the rest of it doing work she loved: teaching yoga and writing.

Her first collection, The Burning Point, published in March 2004, won the White Pin Poetry Prize and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Poems from her recent collection, The Warrior: A Mother’s Story of a Son at War, have appeared in a two-page spread in O, The Oprah Magazine, Nicholas Kristoff’s New York Times column and the local PBS show New York Voices.

KILL SCHOOL

That was the summer he rappelled
down mountains on rope

that from a distance looked thin
as the dragline of a spider,

barely visible, the tension
he descended

into the made-up
state of Pineland

with soldiers from his class.
They started with a rabbit,

and since my son was the only one
who’d never hunted,

he went first. He described it:
moonlight, the softness

of fur, another pulse
against his chest.

The trainer showed him
how to rock the rabbit

like a baby in his arms,
faster and faster,

until every sinew surrendered
and he smashed its head into a tree.

They make a little squeaking sound,
he said. They cry.

He drove as he told me:
You said you wanted to know.

I didn’t ask how he felt.
Maybe I should have,

but I was biting
off the skin from my lips,

looking out
beyond the glittering line

of traffic flying
past us in the dark.

 

Learn more about this speaker

"The Warrior Returns"
Newsweek

"Inventory"
The New York Times Magazine

"For My Son, In Iraq"
O, The Oprah Magazine

"Winners of the Iraq Poetry Contest"
The New York Times

"The Warrior: In Love and Battle"
The Colorado Springs Independent

"A Mother's Fears, A Son's Resolve"
Rocky Mountain News

"Soldier Boy"
The New York Times Book Review

"Soldier's Mother Bridges Distance with Poetry"
NPR's All Things Considered

"Sending a Son off to War: a Mother's Anguish"
Alternet.org

"This Mom Fought Fear with Poetry"
USA Today