Dear Vaccine

Naomi Shihab Nye, Palestinian American, is the Young People's Poet Laureate of the United States (Poetry Foundation). For 2019-2020 she was the poetry editor of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Selected for Lifetime Achievement Awards by the National Book Critics Circle and the Texas Institute of Letters in both 2019 and 2020, she has conducted writing workshops all over the world and published more than 35 books of poetry and prose. David Hassler is director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. He cofounded Traveling Stanzas, a national community arts project, and is the author or editor of nine books of poetry and nonfiction, including the play May 4th Voices: Kent State, 1970. Tyler Meier is director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center. His poems and prose have appeared in POETRY, Boston Review, Indiana Review, Bat City Review, Washington Square Review, At Length, Tupelo Quarterly, Arizona Republic, AGNI, and elsewhere.

"In the midst of all this division around the world, something to bring us together." -PBS NewsHour "Dear Vaccine offers a snapshot in time so that readers of the future can glimpse what it was like to anticipate and receive protection from a killer virus during a global pandemic." -Mike DeWine, governor of Ohio "What would you say to the vaccine if it could hear you? Dear Vaccine is an absolute treasure trove of personal, poetic responses. We are living through history, I've said to my children. People in the future will read about this time in books. Lucky for us, and lucky for them, one of those books will be this one. May the hope inside these pages be contagious." -Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod and Keep Moving "Dear Vaccine, the genius of David Hassler, Tyler Meier, and Naomi Shihab Nye, gave us permission to put into words that which weighed on our hearts during the global pandemic. The messages of grief, endurance, and hope from all around the world can be found in this timely book of poetry written by the people who lived it and have poems to tell." -Donna S. Collins, executive director, Ohio Arts Council "Dear Vaccine is both address and adoration for the medical breakthrough that has liberated much of the world from unending lockdowns. Its bittersweet and sincere letter-poems personalize the notion that, regardless of age, condition, or location, that which makes us human also makes us vulnerable. It is as if the virus knows where to find us: classrooms, coffee shops, theaters, even our own living rooms. Even the briefest of lines reflects how far many had drifted from life's small pleasures only to pine for them once they were taken away. The frustration of airport security. The silence of museums. Broken into six sections-based on isolation, gratitude, grief, vaccine clinic, nostalgia, and possibility-this anthology encompasses the range of emotions we all experienced as the pandemic swept across the planet in waves. In Dear Vaccine, we are unified by loss yet comforted by both science and art." -Arlan Hess, City Books, Pittsburgh