Poetry Reading with Joyce Holmes McAllister

Join us for an afternoon with local author, Joyce Holmes McAllister.This author of Return and Before We Knew has a new book coming out! Food for Thought is a collection of Joyce’s poems about food, both humorous and serious, with original watercolor illustrations by Mary Beth O’Connor. There will also be a book signing.

Joyce Holmes McAllister’s first poetry chapbook Before We Knew was published by Foot Hills Press when she was eighty-five years old. Within a little over a year, she published her second chapbook Return, put out by Yellow Sofa Press.

 McAllister started writing poetry in secondary school. Her involvement with food and cooking also began when she was young, and developed over the years into a second passion, along with poetry. Besides cooking, she acquired a knowledge of food history as well as food literature, and became familiar with the personalities famous in that genre.

After her retirement as an administrator at Cornell University, she devoted much of her time to creative writing, primarily poetry. It was during this period that McAllister started writing poems about food, both humorous and serious. The collection Food For Thought is devoted to that effort.