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Parallel Press Publishes That Red Dirt Road
Posted 05/03/2010
MADISON, Wis.- In her poetry chapbook That Red Dirt Road, Kay Sanders explores themes of family and place as touchstones in life’s journey. Often told from the viewpoint of a child who quietly watches and absorbs the inter-connectedness of family and life, the poems end with a family outing on “back roads, dirt roads / that mark our route with a cloud / of dust, pursued by a moving cloud / of red, as though we’ve turned / our backs on the promised land. / But our dad knows / where the wild grapes grow / . . . We never ask . . . are we there yet? Somehow we know.”
Kay Sanders first connected with Wisconsin sitting at her fourth-grade desk in the Deep South, reading Little House in the Big Woods, never 
dreaming that Wisconsin would one day become her home. She grew up hearing her mother and her maternal aunts recite poetry, sing songs, argue, tell stories, and quote scripture, sealing her destiny as a poet.
After earning her bachelor’s degree in history from Auburn University and completing graduate work there, she married her German professor, moved to Wisconsin, and raised a family of five children. She worked a variety of jobs including time spent as a substitute teacher, church secretary, and proofreader and typist of graduate theses, before retiring in 2007 as Lay Ministry Coordinator for her church.
Her work has been published in Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, Fox Cry, Free Verse, and Wisconsin People and Ideas. She is the recipient of three Wisconsin Regional Writers’ Association jade rings for essay and poetry won various awards with the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets; and has won awards in the poetry contests of Wisconsin People and Ideas. She is currently working on a second poetry manuscript entitled Traveling Light and resides in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries. For more information, please visit http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry/.
Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
A selection from his chapbook, That Red Dirt Road:
Perspective
Remember when you chased your cousins through rows
of graves, chanting rhymes
When you skipped through the cemetery tagging
tombstones, keeping count
When you balanced on low cement walls that divided
family plots, arms outstretched,
teetering, falling, shouting laughter
When you ran a curious finger over deep
indentations, cool inscriptions of a lifetime
Remember when you ran joyful through the dead
