Therese Leigh, poet, fiction writer, and artist, is completing work on her bachelor of arts degree in history, with minors in classical studies, anthropology, and liberal arts, and a bachelor of fine arts degree in art with a painting emphasis, to graduate this June from Utah State University. Her focus of historical study is ancient and medieval -- anything up through the Reformation. Although she has a deep interest in figurative art, most of her work is abstract. Major influences include Kokoschka, Klimt, Kirchner, Klee, Picasso, Grunewald, Morris Graves, Franz Kline. Her poetry is influenced by study in Greek of Homer, Sappho, Archilochos, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and in Latin of Catullus, Vergil, Ovid, Juvenal, and Propertius. Modern poets she loves and hopes have influenced her writing include Federico Garcia Lorca, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Seamus Heaney, Jorie Graham, Linda Bierds, Marek Lugowski, and many others.

"In my checkered career, I have worked as a book store and library clerk, secretary on Wall Street, hat check/cigarette girl at the Latin Quarter and Copacabana, nude model at an art institute, trainee map draftsman, swimmer with a ten foot dolphin, performer in a circus, waitress at a Beatnik coffee house, actress, journalist, and newspaper editor. At the convent school I attended, they thought I would be a nun. It didn't work out."

Hobbies -- "I listen to music constantly--mostly classical, but my tastes are catholic, including jazz, acid, punk and alternative rock, folk, and even a little country. I love chamber music, piano, opera, and ballet. I swim a mile every morning, do a little modest bicycling. Formerly I skied, surfed, and did gourmet cooking. No time for that now."

Theresa lives in Logan, Utah with her two tomcats Vergil and Catullus. Her 30-year-old son, "brilliant, gorgeous hunk, and nice guy", mountain biker and member of the National Ski Patrol, a graduate of Utah State with a degree in political science, also worked on a masters degree in natural resources, and lives nearby with his "main squeeze". Therese has lived in Indiana, where she was born, and in New York, California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Wyoming, and has traveled widely in this country, Mexico, Europe, and the Mediterranean.

"I would like to do more traveling," she said, "but at the present time I'm totally absorbed in my studies and completing five separate and different books of poetry and many, many paintings. This is the focus of my life right now and demands all of my energy."

Utah Poems poem collaboration

Torch Songs artwork

Like Chinese Milk artwork

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A Small Garlic Press book author profile. Last updated on 2002/7/1.
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