In the Company of Women, explores the life-imprinting impact of women's relationships, so I will begin by exploring a few of mine; let's link arms (if only in the figurative sense)and please join me on the road of recollection. When I've been asked, "Who's one of the Most Amazing Women you've known in your life?" I invariably answer: Milagros, a 71-year-old breast cancer survivor who I was fortunate to know as a student in a university writing class I was teaching in Miami in the late 1990s. Her sunny disposition and wellspring of spiritual and intellectual perseverance in striving to attain her academic goals later in life never failed to buoy up her classmates' spirits--or mine.

Other amazing women who I am inextricably grateful for, include my mother Karen--an ivied pillar of sensibility to steady me, and violet voice of reason to guide me through life's labyrinth; my late Grandmother Mae--a tiger lily, lilac, and West Virginia wildflower all intertwined in one gorgeous garden of strength, beauty, grace, and eternal vitality...I visit this thriving memory garden often; Claudia--a divorced mother of 4 in the 1980s, whose ever-blooming rose of resilience helped her in successfully raising her children on her own, in addition to rising above the prickliness of prejudice as a proud Mexican American in America before the musk rose of multiculturalism became rooted in society...a celebration of ethnic diversity that flourishes in vibrance today. (I am married to her youngest son); Sheenagh--an accomplished public schoolteacher, peer-poet, and whimsical windflower of a friend; my late friend Tammi--a steadfast dahlia of dignity who personified Courage by mentally and spiritually surviving the daily hell of paranoid schizophrenia; and finally, "Ashla" (name changed to protect her privacy)--a radiant lily-bulb of a lady who is presently battling cancer. Like Milagros, Ashla's indomitable optimism is supernova-bright, in spite of the shadowy side-effects of chemo--truly, she illumines as Inspiration Incarnate.

Among other things, Creative Inspiration is seeded by love, loss, tragedy, triumph, tears, and laughter; Art is the flowering of such seeds. I invite you to gaze through a quintessential lens wound by wisteria of human truths presented by a cornucopia of women of all ages, cultures, and life-experiences. Subtlety, poignancy, vivacity, and lilt-of-the-line all thrum in the poetry, anecdotes, artwork, and photography of In The Company of Women; page after page of nuanced emotions, exquisite expressions of introspection and reflection coalesce to form a color-splashed "book-bouquet" that will indelibly invigorate you again and again on Life's dynamic journey.