PAULETTA HANSEL

(August 29, 1959–)

Poet Pauletta Hansel is one of three children of Lamie Lewis Hansel and Charles Hansel of Somerset, Kentucky. Born and raised in eastern Kentucky, she began writing when she was a child and became a published poet (in Mountain Review) when she was a teenager. At age sixteen, while still in high school, she was recruited to enroll at Antioch College. She attended Antioch's Appalachian campus in Beckley, West Virginia, and graduated in 1978 with a B.A. in human services. Her master's degree, with a concentration in Montessori education, is from Xavier University (1980).

In 1976, Hansel's work was featured in Ms. magazine in an article on Appalachian women poets. At age fifteen, she told the Ms. reporter that both her grandfathers were miners, but “home” for her “meant one mountain community college town after the other, wherever her father happened to be teaching philosophy. ‘The outside,’ she says, ‘never did seep in all that much.’”

She was instrumental in organizing early networks of Appalachian writers, including the Soupbean Poets, a politically active writers group she co-founded at Antioch; Street Talk, a theater collective that wrote, produced, and performed plays locally and nationally from 1980 to 1984; and the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (SAWC), which is still active today.

Since 1980, Hansel has worked in Cincinnati, first as a teacher at a Montessori school, then as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society of Cincinnati, then as an administrator for the Urban Appalachian Council, where her main responsibilities focused on community arts programs and community development. She is currently a teacher and administrator at Women Writing for (a) Change, a feminist creative writing center.

She gave up writing from 1984 to 1994, in part, she says, because “in my early years I tried too hard to be an ‘Appalachian writer,’ and lost the sound of my own voice in trying to blend with others. My work now is definitely influenced by my Appalachian roots…but the stories and language reflect not just my past but my present as an urban dweller for more than half my life.” Her poetry has appeared in Appalachian Journal, Adena, Twigs, Wind, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and in anthologies including New Ground, A Gathering at the Forks, and Old Wounds, New Words.

OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

PRIMARY

Poetry: Divining (2001). We're Alright but We Ain't Special (1976), with Gail V. Amburgey, Mary Joan Coleman. What's a Nice Hillbilly Like You…? (1976). Some Poems by Some Women (1975).

SECONDARY

Jacqueline Bernard, “Mountain Voices: Appalachian Poets,” Ms. 5:2 (August 1976), 34–38. Jackie Demaline, “The Arts Life: Desk doesn't bind this poet,” Cincinnati Enquirer, 30 July 2000.