Susquehanna - Joanne Hotchkiss Indigo

“Who is this Indigo? I read this fine collection of poetry by Indigo Joanne Hotchkiss with excitement. Little did I know that I would be flung into a world full of singing oceans of trees, dark muddy rivers, sunlight on children running down a summer street, listening to piano music in dusty sunlit hallway and hunkered down in a cozy van on a rainy day entwined with a lover. Indigo’s poetry moves you on journeys full of singing trees, alders, aspens, redwoods, magnolias. Her poetry is populated with complex lovers, parents, siblings, the suicidal grandfather whose name she bears. She is gentle and kindly in her estimation of these people and of her own frailties. Her journey winds from the sunny lakeside porch of 10 Kendall Avenue along the Susquehanna River, through the wilds of Montana, sturdy Seattle farmers’ market, down to majestic Yosemite and urbane Golden Gate Park. She is Indigo, sister to the trees, breathing in the moonlight and exhaling the pure poetry of her soul. Come prepared, gentle reader, the journey begins . . .”

Indigo Joanne Hotchkiss was born in Binghamton, New York in 1933. She graduated from Dana Hall School for Girls in 1950. She received a BA in English and minors in art and music from Skidmore College in 1954 and took graduate courses at the University of Washington and San Francisco State University.  Her first poem was published in the only Chinese-English newspaper in San Francisco in 1968. A series of poems was published in the same year in the Greek Issue of Hanging Loose. She has had her poems published in San Francisco Magazine, Plexus, Cries of the Spirit — A Celebration of Women’s Spirituality (Beacon Press), and The Other Side Of The Postcard (City Lights Foundation). She and Cliff McIntire were the Founding Editors of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. She helped launch the Haight Ashbury Soup Kitchen and has been a volunteer for the Bound Together Collective’s Prison Literacy Project. She has organized and hosted poetry reading series including ones at the Sleeping Lady Café in Marin County and Café International on Haight Street. She has taught yoga and worked with runaways as a policewoman in Seattle.