Bethany Reid grew up on a farm surrounded by timberlands in southwest Washington State. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Sparrow, winner of the 2012 Kenneth and Geraldine Gell Poetry Prize, and The Pear Tree: Elegy for a Farm, which won the 2023 Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award. In 2019 she was a featured poet at Abbey of the Arts: https://abbeyofthearts.com/blog/2019/11/20/featured-poet-bethany-reid/ Retired from full-time college teaching, she spends her time writing and hanging out with poets wherever she has the opportunity.

Other poems on the web by Bethany Reid:
Four poems
Four poems
"Sparrow"
"Praise Bread"
"If I'm Not"
"The Grapefruit"
"Lessons in Beekeeping"

Bethany Reid's Website.

Bethany Reid on Twitter.

About The Pear Tree:

"Bethany Reid's The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm is more than a haunting elegy for a farm; it's a powerful evocation of childhood and a vanished way of life. In poems lush with detail, Reid renders the beauty and suffering of bygone days, not with nostalgia but with clear-eyed honesty, as each poem reveals its hidden facets. Under the watchful eye of a pear tree planted by a grandmother on homesteaded land, we witness the pleasure of day-to-day life rooted in the earth, the heart-wrenching loss of a brother, a father "who taught us to choose what matters and put a fence around it," a devout mother who can still play the piano when words have flown. "Who will gather what we leave behind?" one poem asks. Moving freely back and forth in time, this well-steeped, finely-honed collection offers a complex, satisfying answer."
—Holly J. Hughes

"Packed with a century of images and sensory, sensual detail of Southwest Washington logging, farming, and family, this book transported me across time, place, and generations. More than a collection of poems, The Pear Tree expands these people and this place into an inspirational lament, lifting family and home to epic levels of life and struggle, love and wonder."
—Paul Marshall