Reading: The Making of a Matriot

Definition: Matriot, noun. 1. One who loves his or her country. 2. One who loves and protects the people of his or her country. 3. One who perceives national defense as health, education, and shelter for all the people in his or her country, and the world.

“If national defense is the issue, why not, as poet-activist Frances Payne Adler suggests, a ‘national defense’ budget that defends the people through affordable health, education, and shelter for everyone?”

—Adrienne Rich, in Arts of the Possible

“These poems touch and explore the core of human existence—the wars, the illnesses, but also the love, the courage, the defiance, of which her own writing is an example. Her definition of ‘matriot’ alone makes it worthwhile opening the book.”

—Howard Zinn, author, People’s History of the United States

Poet Frances Payne Adler is the author of five books: two poetry collections, Making of a Matriot and Raising The Tents, and three collaborative poetry-photography books and social action art exhibitions with photographer Kira Carrillo Corser, which have shown in galleries, universities, and state capitol buildings across the country, as well as in the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C. Adler, along with Diana Garcia and Debra Busman, co-edited Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing, winner of the 2009 ForeWord Book of the Year Award for Anthologies. Her current exhibition, Dare I Call You Cousin, is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is a collaboration with Israeli artists, photographer Michal Fattal and videographer Yossi Yacov. Adler has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Regional Award, a California State Senate Award for Artistic and Social Collaboration, and the New Millennium Obama Award. Adler, Professor Emerita and founder of the Creative Writing & Social Action Program at California State University Monterey Bay, lives in Portland, Oregon.