Brooking has been in conversation with the world through poetry since she was a little girl writing about bluebells in her St. Louis backyard. These days her poetry focuses on the magic of the mundane and the questions that rise from conversations with the heart, spirit, and the natural world. Though her writing career may have peaked in grade school with poems featured in local papers and national children's anthologies, she is currently finalizing her first full collection of grown-up poems, Prayers in the Palette of Pink, and has a Tedx Talk on poetry as a way of being. Also an activist, 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: as a writer, brooking doesn't capitalize her name (unless it's at the beginning of a sentence) because she sees the poet as more conduit than author. That said, these are actually her given first and middle names, not a made up pen name. 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 because she wants to honor her maternal lineage, and men get enough of the credit in this world already. 


                                                                                     ~ CONNECT ~
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 (photo by Jim Wang)