Description
Olivia In Five, Seven, Five; Autism In Haiku
by Kathie Giorgio
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-852-0
2022
Kathie Giorgio was forty years old when she gave birth to the baby she and her husband, Michael, planned for, hoped for, dreamed of. But Olivia wasn’t anyone this veteran mother of three teenagers expected. Olivia cried all the time. She wouldn’t eat table food. She wouldn’t speak. Her favorite toy was a bucket of hundreds of tiny plastic bears in rainbow colors that she spent hours every day arranging in a long looping line through the house. And finally…she was diagnosed as autistic when she was three years old. Kathie and Michael, both writers, were told that their daughter would never have words, and that she would only see them as “bumps on a log”. Yet she smiled at them every day.
Olivia In Five, Seven, Five; Autism In Haiku is the story, in poetic form, of a mother’s love for a child, and the way that love could blast through a diagnosis and lift this little girl who smiled. Kathie smiled back.
KATHIE GIORGIO is the critically acclaimed author of six novels, The Home For Wayward Clocks (2011), Learning To Tell (A Life)Time (2013), Rise From The River (2015), In Grace’s Time (2017), If You Tame Me (2019), and All Told (2021), two story collections, Enlarged Hearts (2012) and Oddities & Endings; The Collected Stories Of Kathie Giorgio (2016), a collection of essays, Today’s Moment Of Happiness Despite The News; A Year Of Spontaneous Essays (2018), and three poetry books, True Light Falls In Many Forms (2016), When You Finally Said No (2019), and No Matter Which Way You Look, There Is More To See (2020). Giorgio’s short stories and poems have appeared in countless literary magazines and anthologies. Her short story, Snapdragon, was performed on stage for the Stories On Stage series at Su Teatro theatre in Boulder, Colorado. Her poem, Harvest Moon, was included in the Poetry Leaves exhibition in Waterford, Michigan, in 2020. She’s been nominated in both fiction and poetry for the Pushcart Prize, the Write Well Award, the Million Writer Award, and for both fiction and poetry for the Best of the Net Anthology. Her novel The Home For Wayward Clocks won the 2011 Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her novel In Grace’s Time was runner-up in fiction in the 2017 Maxy Award and the second place winner of the 2017 Silver Pen Award For Literary Excellence. Her novel If You Tame Me won second place in the Women’s Fiction category of the Pencraft Awards For Literary Excellence. Her poem, Light, was runner-up in Rosebud Magazine’s 2021 Poetry competition, and her poem, Again, won first prize in the Wisconsin Writers Association’s Jade Ring contest.
She lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin, with her husband, mystery writer Michael Giorgio, their daughter Olivia, who is writing her first novel, a neurotic dog named after Ursula LeGuin, a fat cat named Edgar Allen Paw, and a tiny cat named Muse.
Besides writer, Giorgio is also the director and founder of the international creative writing studio, AllWriters’ Workplace & Workshop LLC. AllWriters’ offers online and on-site courses and workshops in all genres and abilities of creative writing, as well as coaching and editing services. Thousands of writers worldwide have gotten their start at AllWriters’, and thousands have continued their career there. Giorgio has taught for 23 years. She also paints, primarily in acrylics, though she has a fondness for painting mannequins.
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