noise & silence: Bio

I have been many shapes before attaining congenial form: bookseller, union organizer, a black feather in a blue dumpster, farmhand, editor, a fish falling from a clear sky, factory worker, and teacher, etc.

I attended both Naropa University and the University of California at Davis, along with Southwestern College (Santa Fe, NM). I currently work as a somatic-oriented mental health counselor in Oregon.

I am the author of several full-length books of poetry:

Absence: Presence

(Shanti Arts Publishing, 2023)

All the Beautiful Dead

(Winner of The Bitter Oleander Press Prize in 2015;

Finalist for the New Mexico Book Award in 2016)

and On the Side of the Crow

(Published in both the US and UK:

Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, NY, 2006; and Parthian Books, Wales, UK, 2011)

along with a novel,

A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind

(Parthian Books, UK, 2011)

A review of On the Side of the Crow from Literateur.com

A Fish Trapped inside the Wind

was given a starred review by

Booklist:

“Like the most finely cadenced, beautifully fanciful works of surrealism, this novel beckons with its subtle nuances before it leaps into a dazzling mastery that will ensnare even the casual reader. The town of Villon, Belgium, is experiencing an extremely odd phenomenon. Dead fish are strewn everywhere. Flung over yards and stoops and fields, the fish puzzle the residents no end as they speculate on the significance of such a bizarre happening. Other intersecting events include a rally meant to protest a decision to use local quarries as toxic dumps and the festival of St. Woelfred, who fled into the wilderness in the seventh century to live out her days reflecting in prayer. A rumored set of lost Rimbaud poems propels the action in ways unimaginable at the start yet utterly convincing by the conclusion. Gholson skillfully interweaves the individual stories of six main characters: a magician, a priest, a Rimbaud scholar, a journalist, a seer, and an aging lothario, who connect and conflict with one another in ways that ring true as each grapples with the choice of "walking through the mirror" of illusion--or not. Building to an extraordinary crescendo of an ending, Gholson's poetic, purely magical, yet resoundingly human tale deserves a wide audience.”

Other Reviews:

Storgy.com: review of "A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind"

Chapbooks:

The No One Poems

(Thirty West Publishing, 2021)