Welcome!

I'm a writer and radio host, author of Fierce Delight: Poems of Early Motherhood.

My next collection is This Ground Beneath Our Feet - poems about finding common ground and planting seeds for the future. Coming in April.

I'm so glad you've stopped by. 

 "I tell you this

to break your heart,

by which I mean only

that it break open and never close again

to the rest of the world."

--Mary Oliver, "Lead"

See what people are saying about Fierce Delight:

“Bright's poems of marriage and new motherhood remind us of the importance of daily awe, as she writes of "how much is alive. How we are alive inside it." These poems remind us love "can rise like steam, like heat, like oil from the stew," and hope blooms again and again leaving "our kitchen floor strewn with petals." This is a collection to be savored and shared.”

-Shana Youngdahl, author of "A Cage To Welcome" and "History, Advice and Other Half-Truths"

“What a pleasure reading these heartfelt poems. In Fierce Delight, Emily Bright tells us of her life in loving detail—more than that, she examines it and revels in it. While never avoiding the difficulties of raising a family, Emily Bright is generous in revealing all its
joys. Indeed, a lyrical delight.”
--Mary Logue, author of Heart Wood

See what people are saying about This Ground Beneath Our Feet:

“Emily Bright’s beautiful new book, This Ground Beneath Our Feet, is a letter to a world where ‘no one wrote it down.’ No one, that is until Emily —with her wonderfully radiant name— came along to do what poetry does best, which is to make a place to keep the momentary from oblivion, to tell the stories in black ink. What begins as a commission from the past ends in a love song to the world of here and now, ‘just one small integrated / part of everything.’”

  —Joyce Sutphen, former Minnesota Poet Laureate

““Emily Bright's This Ground Beneath Our Feet, while abundantly grounded in personal detail and ancestral history, also testifies to our collective history and even the geological past. What really holds these poems together as a collection is not their technique, nor even their historical scope, but their unrelenting compassion for their subjects. It's a way of looking at the world that tends to rub off on you.”

——Max Garland, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate of Wisconsin

“In This Ground Beneath Our Feet, delight and labor organically entwine to become equally precious. Here, sea mammals, with their own language, ‘are weaving poetry in web and water;’ human border crossings have been occurring for centuries; a boy in North Dakota unearths a dinosaur; Emily Dickenson bakes a cake. In the timeless tradition of poetry’s yearning to both belong and yet always be somewhere else, Bright gorgeously illuminates the ‘wild goodness’ of being alive.”

  —Ed Bok Lee, American Book Award winning author of Whorled