Patricia Smith Ranzoni: Born up the Penobscot River in Lincoln, Maine in 1940 to a Canadian-American woodsman from Webster Plantation and an 8th generation Yankee farm girl of coastal Maine, both descended from mixed Native and European wilderness and border/borderless peoples as far back as can be found, so far, in what became Maritime Canada and Maine, Patricia Smith Ranzoni and family tend one of the subsistence farms of her youth in Bucksport, where her father became a rigger at the paper mill after WWII and where she has been named Poet Laureate “for as long as she shall live.” A retired education and mental health consultant, she is self- and folk-schooled in poetry to which she turned in midlife to document the disappearing ways of her people. Published across the U.S. and abroad, her work is drawn from for courses and archives of Maine’s writers and history and class, most recently in Bedding Vows, Love Poems From Outback Maine (North Country Press 2012), her twelfth title; and an anthology, Still Mill, Poems, Stories & Songs of Making Paper in Bucksport, Maine (North Country Press, 2017) of which she is editor.
Downeast Maine Publisher of Fine Books