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Meet Milford’s Newest Poet Laureate
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stablished in 2016 to elevate poetry within the Milford community, the individual who serves as the Milford Poet Laureate is an advocate for poetry, literature, and the arts and contributes to the City’s literary legacy through public readings and participation
in civic events. Following in the footsteps of the city’s first Poet Laureate, Mick Theebs, Joan Kwan Glass was selected through a competitive process by a panel of literary experts, civic leaders, and educators. She will serve in this honorary position for four years. The mother of three and poetry editor at the West Trestle Review, Glass has been a public school educator for the past 20 years. She’s been published in various journals, and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times. Glass found herself drawn to writing at an early age. “I wrote my first poem when I was six years old: a rhyming poem about George Washington in my Hello Kitty notebook,” she COURTESY OF JOAN KWAN GLASS
remembers. “I quickly fell in love with the work of Shel Silverstein as a child and still have some of his poems memorized.” This love for poetry remained with Glass wherever she went. From growing up in a suburb of Detroit, to summers spent visiting her family in South Korea, poetry proved itself the perfect instrument with which to process her
Joan Kwan Glass is Milford’s second Poet Laureate,
emotions and understand her world. “I think
and hopes to draw on her experience as an educator
I’ve always been drawn to writing; as an
to bring the art of poetry to a wider audience.
12 Milford Living • Spring
First Morning
The first school bus heaves itself around the corner, an immense groaning canary pitches its hips burdened, forward then flies. We are the first people and today is the first morning. Breathing in and out, trying to read each other’s eyes as there is no language yet. Maybe this ordinary courtyard of white stones and flowers is where we start again or this familiar brick pathway. Maybe it is every door opening in every schoolhouse, welcoming us in despite how screwed up the world can be. A teacher takes a child’s hand, and the child goes. Inside, maps wait to be opened. —Joan Kwan Glass
