Tiffany Chaney (Poetry) | Winston-Salem, NC
Booking Fee: |
$300-$1500 |
Will Travel: |
Anywhere |
Contact: |
http://www.tiffanychaney.com/contact.html |
Website: |
http://www.tiffanychaney.com |
Tiffany Chaney is a poet, writer, and artist living in North Carolina. She holds a B.A. in creative writing from Salem College. She is particularly interested in the intersection of mythology and folklore with the creative arts, as well as the whimsy in everyday life.
Her artwork has been shown around the south, and her literary publications include VQR, Pedestal Magazine, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Rebelle Society. Her poetry book Between Blue and Grey won the 2013 Best in Poetry award at the Mother Vine Festival. Chaney is working on her first novel — a look at a young woman’s Descent into adulthood: the loss of a father and the relationship with a controlling mother; what a modern Descent into underworld means for a once goddess who is now just a teenage girl.
Books
Press & Reviews
Between Blue & Grey is a poetry collection split into four separate yet seamless divisions—The Very Outside, Thicker Than Water, The Animus, and Dry Air—which take the readers to picturesque and affective sceneries that terrify the mind or prick the heart, challenge thoughts with mind-bending truths, awaken the consciousness to the mystical and the ethereal. Sometimes revisiting heartwarming mementos, other times anticipating “the beauty of the next.”
Tiffany Chaney has mesmerized me with her brilliant and neoteric poesy so much that I’ve read between blue & grey three times and counting. With each reading, the same words take on a different meaning. With each reading, something I may have made light of at first becomes momentous. With each reading, I get to see the imageries more vibrantly or starkly and feel the atmosphere more lightly or profoundly.
Above all, poems from Thicker Than Water really hit home for me. Family plays a significant role in my life that it breaks my heart when reading about a child having been abandoned and feeling unloved. It warms me when, in contrast, a child feels unconditionally loved. And it’s a sign of hope when a child can learn to become a whole adult in spite of everything and utter loving and comforting words to their future offspring: “it is your choice / to be born, / to live a life.”
Hopes for Her would be my most beloved poem in the collection. Having been a wishful thinker with pink shades on as a little girl, having been stripped of some of that ‘innocent’ quality, having to wish for it all to return intact, I can only hope, wish, and strive for my future children, for all future children to dream big and fly far, always. Like the little girl in the poem who “folds words to her chest, / the wings of her little girl storybook / lifting her above the bigness of impossibility / and the smallness of people”.
—Nadia Gerassimenko, author of Moonchild Dreams (http://www.tepidautumn.net)
At times raw, painful, and melancholy; at others hopeful… In The Next, Chaney writes: ‘When you find yourself in the midst of a perfect present/ and attempt to find yourself there again you cannot/ The only hope you have is the beauty of the next.’ In her first collection, we are led by the hand down a path with the speaker and are left, after each poem, wanting the beauty of the next. A tremendous collection, a young talented poet I am sure we will see more of.
—Helen Vitoria, Poet and Editor-In-Chief of Thrush Poetry Journal/ Thrush Press
