Traveling Light Along Life's Journey - Paperback

Cook, Glenna: - Traveling Light is Glenna Cook's fourth full-length collection of poems, all published by MoonPath Press. Previous books are Thresholds (2017), a finalist for the Washington State Book Award for Poetry in 2018, Shapes of Time (2022), and Like Joy (2024). Cook grew up in Olympia, Washington, where, at age eighteen, she married her husband, Kenneth. They had three children (their oldest, a son, died of cancer in 2016 (at age sixty), and she has nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. After a twenty-five-year career with the telephone company, she retired from US West Communications in 1990, then immediately enrolled in college. She graduated from the University of Puget Sound magna cum laude in 1994 at age fifty-eight, with a BA in English Literature. While at university, she won the Hearst Essay Prize for the Humanities and the Nixeon Civille Handy Poetry Prize. She is a Hedgebrook alumna and a member of Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. She has read her poetry many places in the Puget Sound region, and published dozens of poems in journals and anthologies, the latest being This Light Called Darkness: A Raven Chronicles Anthology (2023) and When a Woman Tells the Truth: Writings and Creative Work by Women Over 80, edited by Dena Taylor and Wilma Marcus Chandler (2024), with guidance from Janet Fine (2024). Her husband died in 2018, after sixty-three years of marriage. Cook has Parkinson's disease, which she keeps at bay with medicine, diet, and a rigorous program of exercise. Two of her favorite sayings are: We make our own weather and (from Rumi) What you seek is seeking you. Ever since she read that a well-known poet claimed that one could not write poetry after eighty, she has set about trying to prove him wrong. Now, in her nineties, she knows that this may be her last book, but she plans to keep writing poetry, until she can't.