Ann Goldsmith holds a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Denver. A former newspaper reporter and librarian, she now writes and teaches in Buffalo, NY where she has lived for the past ten years and, from 1982 to 1995, served as Erie and Niagara County coordinator for ALPS. She also teaches four adult writing workshops, one of which is in its tenth year; and has served as a guest lecturer at D'Youville College and Niagara County Community College. In 1985-86, she was a member of the poetry panel for the New York Foundation for the Arts. her most recent reading was at the State University of New York in Buffalo, where she participated in the First Annual Women's Writing Festival, sponsored by the University's Creative Writing Program.

Twice finalist in the "Discovery"/The Nation competition, Ann won a Western New York Writers Residency award in 1984 and in 1983, was one of "Five New Voices" chosen from a regional competition to read at the Buffalo State College Burchfield Center. She was one of ten poets published in 1982 in a folio edition of poems inspired by paintings and sculpture at Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery. her poems have appeared in SATURDAYS' WOMEN, an anthology selected from a national competition; ON TURTLE'S BACK, a New York State anthology, and such journals as Helicon Nine, Penbroke magazine, Earth's Daughters. Slow Loris Reader, Niagara Magazine and Escarpments. 


MYOPIA


When I was six they gave me glasses. 
I no longer fell off the curb. 
I ate peas with a fork, counted dandelion 
hairs and the holes in screens. 
On the classroom board, numbers 
leapt to their places 
like the glass spokes in kaleidoscopes.

I marveled at the black hearts of poppies. 
the bellows in frogs' throats, 
the clarity of edges - how nothing 
spilled into the spaces claimed 
by doors, waves or stars.

On Christmas Eve, after dark, 
I took my glasses off to gaze at the tree. 
The needles became a dark curtain 
but every light had a halo 
and the shimmering balls blurred double-size, 
great camellias of red, blue, green and silver 
afloat in the shadowed room.

I sat on the floor for a long time, 
then felt my way to bed, 
a mole with a star on her nose, 
squinting, clutching the round 
thick lenses ground to perfection.