UTSPS Poet of the Year 2009 Gail Gunnarson Schimmelpfennig was born in Ogden, Utah, and attended public schools there. She grew up loving language. She wrote her first poem at age 7, and was hooked. She met her husband Scott, a computer hardware expert, while attending Weber State College as an English major. They have lived in Ogden, Provo, Salt Lake City, West Valley, and Sandy, Utah. They have one daughter, Jennifer, a web designer, and one granddaughter, Autumn, a fourth grader. Gail is employed by the Canyons School District, and enjoys teaching teenagers about writing. She recently returned to college at Weber University and completed her English degree, in preparation for a career in teaching English. She also writes science fiction/fantasy. Her interests include anthropology, skiing, needlework of many kinds, basketry, and painting on silk. She is a twenty-three year volunteer with Girl Scouts of Utah. Gail’s book, The Frozen Kingdom, is a book of poems about her journey through breast cancer. She had been writing seriously for several years before her diagnosis, but during treatment writing also became a healing practice. She used poetry to shape an overwhelming experience into art and meaning. She now sees her diagnosis of cancer in 2001 as the beginning of a dark and ultimately rewarding journey. At the present time, she has no evidence of cancer recurrence, and plans to enjoy a long and healthy life teaching, writing, and being grateful for life. Judge’s comments: It’s difficult to write good poems. It’s extremely difficult to write good and engaging poems that pierce personal depths even as they extend their boundaries and ours, pulling our attention into the larger world. To write about a crisis like breast cancer in a way that unveils the experience without hysteria, self-pity, or a claim based solely on the nature of the subject is a remarkable and praiseworthy act. The author of The Frozen Kingdom succeeds in giving us the nodes, the heartbeat and the steel knife of her cancer journey, but in her capable hands that experience remains part of a whole life. She does not forget that even those who survive such a serious illness face death and each of us must ask “What can be shed,/what can be harvested,/ as the world spins colder,/aims itself at winter.” This poet can give us that kind of perspective because she never forgets that she is not just writing about an illness, she is making art from it. Thus language is pivotal as she gives us her new vocabulary in a poem that remains lyrical even as it lists words like Cytoxin, antiemetics, heart toxicity, and adjuvant therapy. Lying on the operating table she is artist enough to notice the parallel between the placement of the body that her surgery requires, “this narrow metal table/arms spread north and south” and the architecture of Christian churches built to emulate a cross. Even as the anesthesiologist takes her under she invokes the “clear holy wine of forgetting” becoming herself a church, recording the way “Slow chanting flows/ up my long nave/ under ribbed vaults/ relentless through aisles/ drawing toward the altar/ filling the dark crypt.” Her use of the Persephone myth and the Inanna myth enrich our appreciation of the psychic dislocation that occurs when parts of the body are severed and poisons must be endured. It is relief to know the she survived that journey. I have every expectation that this voice will continue to speak to other aspects of our shared human experience, and I look forward to that work as well. The Frozen Kingdom is a remarkable book. I congratulate the author.