Brooking has been in conversation with the world through poetry since she was a little girl writing about bluebells in her St. Louis backyard. For much of the last decade her poetry focused on the magic of the mundane and the questions that rise from conversations with the heart, spirit, and the natural world. She has a Tedx Talk on poetry as a way of being, and spent many years exploring poetry through interactive performance to reconnect us with our older ways of engaging language as an inhabited and communal experience. Lately she's back on the page exploring weaving themes of lineage healing and collective liberation in a collection called The Language Before Amen. An advocate for sanity in an increasingly crazy and isolated world, she is always up to something in the realm of community building, hosts a Podcast on solutions to plastic pollution, and works as a social change coach and facilitator. She lives in the wilds of Los Angeles. 

A note on names: Brooking is an English name from her father's side of the family. Caldwell is an Irish name from her mother's side. Her siblings all have an Irish and English name as well. She doesn't use her last name (Gatewood) as part of her pen name to honor her maternal lineage. 


                                                                                     ~ CONNECT ~
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 (photo by Jim Wang)