Laura Budofsky Wisniewski is the author of Sanctuary, Vermont (Orison Books) which won the 2020 Orison Poetry Prize, the New England Poetry Club's 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. and the 2022 Bronze Foreword INDIES Poetry Book of the Year Award. She is also author of the chapbook, How to Prepare Bear (Redbird Chapbooks). She was a finalist in the 2022 Narrative Poetry Prize, runner up in the 2021 Missouri Review Miller Audio Prize, and winner of Ruminate Magazine's 2020 Janet B. Mccabe Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry International Prize, and the 2014 Passager Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in On The Seawall, Poetry International, Narrative Magazine, The Missouri Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Image, and other journals. Laura lives quietly in a small town in Vermont.

Other poems by Laura Budofsky Wisniewski in Verse Daily:
January 20, 2024:   "The Wandering" "The names on the street signs..."

Other poems on the web by Laura Budofsky Wisniewski:
"At the Window After a Great Snowfall Waiting for You to Come Home"
"Mark on a Tree. Sanctuary, Vermont. 1836"
"Having Never Said the Kaddish"
"Nurse Lynn Speaks Her Thoughts to the Wind"
"My Bubbe's Ghost Drops By"

Laura Budofsky Wisniewski's Website.

About Sanctuary, Vermont:

"Beware the soothing stories of history, that a town named Sanctuary in a Vermont known for bucolic, liberal values has no stories of systemic inequity and violence: 'My mother used to say / If you are ever drowning, raise your eyes; / a rich man will be watching.' This is a book of lost voices, of selfless persona poems shot through with a lyric control so unfaltering it seems Laura Budofsky Wisniewski has written an impossible book. What a rarity, what a necessity for the oppressed not to be generalized but to speak with intricately subtle minds: 'The Overseer says / I am nothing. / But once my mother danced / and I danced with her,' a young girl says. When Wisniewski illuminates one person, all of humanity suddenly brightens. This is an unbelievable, moving book that knows, in the end, the only true sanctuary is the one we make of our lives, and our language, for each other."
—Katie Ford

"Sanctuary, Vermont creates a history of Vermont through a rich range of voices that evoke the state's nuanced and complicated past, a past that takes readers far beyond the mythic pastoral landscape many may conjure up when they think of Vermont. Here, the word sanctuary takes on the ironies of a complex history, and Wisniewski creates a tapestry of Vermont and its people."
—Mary Jane Dickerson

"This is a book of history, a book of voices and compassion. Each poem gives us an individual life through which historical events flow like a river. In Sanctuary, Vermont we see our neighbors—imagined, yes—but imagined so well we join each voice as it comes to us across a span of time, from the 19th century to our own present. These neighbors reveal their struggles with class and loneliness, racism and the damage of war, but also show us kindness, beauty, and resilience in a time of pandemic. Each poem is beautifully vivid and clear, but taken together they swell like a chorus—maybe one of those spontaneous crowd events that gets us all singing the Hallelujah Chorus with a host of strangers, until suddenly no one is a stranger and our hearts are open wide to each other. This is an enormous gift for which we should thank the poet and her poems."
—Betsy Sholl

"If the dead could talk—and here they do—the quaintness of American small-town life would quickly lose its veneer to reveal a more harsh and anguished reality. The locals in this stark book rarely succumb to their own frailty or pettiness, however. More often they're subject to cold fate, and are all too frequently sucked into the maw that is American history—particularly our adventures in war. The result isn't triumph, but temerity, and a sense of community based on endurance and the turn of season that may or may not bring with it promise. Sanctuary, Vermont is a poignant collective song of going forth and going on."
—Maurice Manning