BY LEANNE GRABEL

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Leanne Grabel is a special education and language arts teacher for Portland Public Schools, as well as a performing poet and co-founder of Portland’s legendary poetry cafe, Cafe Lena. Grabel has procured numerous multi-media arts grants over the years to produce spoken-word-based theatrical events that incorporate movement, music and image-“The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression”; “Anger: the Musical” and “The Circus of Anguish and Mirth” among them. Her memoir Brontosaurus was published in 2012. She also has a handful of graphic poetry chapbooks in circulation, some of which have been published here (The Family Fate Ate, On the Road to the Black Abyss, The Last Weekend of Sylvia Plath). Grabel is also completing a full-length manuscript of prose poems called Gold Shoes in which she is experimenting with shape and unusual punctuation in an English teacher’s rebellion against form and structure. leannegrabel.com.