Cheryl Dumesnil – författare

Previously considered the domain of bikers and a rite of passage in the services, tattoos have crawled out society's fringes and onto the ankles of starlets and the biceps of bankers. In this volume writers like Herman Melville, Elizabeth McCracken, Ray Bradbury and Sylvia Plath offer stories in which the full tattoo experience is brilliantly captured and explored. The modern tattoo industry is as comfortable on the mall as on the docks, with today's tattoo parlour denizens likely to be folks who work 9-5 or teach economics at the local college, and this collection pulls us into that alluring world, capturing the mysterious fascination this practice has for us and defining the emotions and intensity attached to being tattooed.

The poems in Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes are survival songs, the tunes you whistle while walking through the Valley of Shadows, to keep your fears at bay and your spirit awake. The shadows here are many—cancer, poverty, a lost love, famine, suicide, war, an ever-encroaching existential angst. But so are the saving graces—a drag queen waitress whose "painted-on eyebrows arched like a bridge / toward starlight," "strawberries / grown fat around dimpled gold seeds," Pink Floyd's "'On the Turning Away' sent through my car / radio like the ghost voice of a beloved long dead," black phoebes rattling "winter / thistles, swollen throats percussing: / this is this is this is . . . " Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes reminds us that where there is shadow there must, necessarily, also be light.

Love Song for Baby X is the moving and humorous story of a lesbian couple''s struggles with infertility as they attempt to become parents, set against the backdrop of the marriage equality movement.

While poet Cheryl Dumesnil suspects she''ll confront some formidable obstacles on her path to parenthood, she is nevertheless unprepared for what she actually encounters, including navigating the maze of the high-tech fertility business, the emotional conundrum of pregnancy loss, and the gathering steam of the marriage equality movement.

Love Song for Baby X follows Cheryl and her unlawfully wedded wife through four conceptions, three miscarriages, a temporarily legal wedding during San Francisco''s Winter of Love in 2004, a stint as poster children for the marriage equality movement, and finally the arrival of their longed-for son—after twenty-five hours of labor. Along the way Dumesnil fails often (and comically) in her attempts to cultivate inner peace. Though she struggles mightily with the opposing forces of hope and fear, in the end, she finds the middle ground between them: acceptance.

Winner of the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of In Praise of Falling, editor of Hitched! Wedding Stories from San Francisco City Hall, and co-editor, with Kim Addonizio, of Dorothy Parker''s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Indiana Review, Calyx, and Many Mountains Moving, among other literary magazines. Her essays have appeared on literarymama.com, hipmama.com, mamazine.com, and in Hip Mama Zine. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and their two sons.