Julene Tripp Weaver
Julene Tripp Weaver, a psychotherapist and writer in Seattle, worked in AIDS services for twenty-one years; she’s certified in the Wise Woman Tradition and wildcrafts to make herbal remedies. Her third poetry collection, truth be bold—Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, won the Bisexual Book Award and four Human Relations Indie Book Awards. No Father Can Save Her, is available in paperback or e-book. Her poems have been published in HEAL, Autumn Sky Poetry, The Seattle Review of Books, Poetry Super Highway, As it Ought To Be, Feels Blind; recent anthologies include I Sing the Salmon Home, Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice.
Julene is an art-activist (Artivist) in the Seattle chapter of the Through Positive Eyes Project. She has attended residencies at the University of Washington’s Helen Riaboff Whitely Center, Centrum, Mineral School and Vashon AIR. She is writing a memoir. Essay publications include: The Guardian, Mollyhouse, Hags on Fire, The Muse (McMaster University), and But You Don’t Look Sick: The Real Life Adventures of Fibro Bitches, Lupus Warriors, and other Super Heroes Battling Invisible Illness. Her latest book is Slow Now With Clear Skies.
2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:
“In post-pandemic America, [Slow Now With Clear Skies] is the book I needed to read. Weaver, an herbalist, knows we and the earth can heal together. Find channels that soothe. . . . Send anxiety into the earth. She uses images from her own life and the viruses that plague our world to witness suffering. And to acknowledge that none of us is the same after the Covid years. Her poetry resonates: It’s time / for massive change . . . / Our planet, slow now with clear skies.”
—Joanne M. Clarkson
New Age Wonder
Make a ritual
Gems heal—find a petrified tree,
a quartz crystal in a creek—
reminders of wonder and belief.
Life force spirals—
find solace in water,
in stone, in gentle rainfall,
breathe petrichor released from earth.
Touch a moss laden nurse log.
Feel the pulse of the moon,
the rising of the sun,
star glitter in the sky—
elemental, essential—
a world your body understands.
