King Grossman is an award-winning poet, novelist, and writer of short prose. His poems and short prose have appeared or are forthcoming in The Round, Licking River Review, Crack the Spine, Forge, Tiger’s Eye, DMQ Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Qwerty, Burningword, Ignatian, Drunk Monkeys, The Paragon Journal, Pennsylvania English, SLAB, Slag Review, Midwest Quarterly, The Borfski Review, Carbon Culture Review, and Nebo. Letters To Alice, his current novel, in 2017 received The Independent Press Award as the Distinguished Favorite in Visionary Fiction, was a Finalist for Literary Fiction in the National Indie Excellence Awards, received the Gold Medal for Inspirational/Visionary Fiction from the Global Ebook Awards, and won two Royal Dragonfly Book awards, for Literary Fiction and Cover Design. A longtime fugitive from the worlds of Wall Street and Capitol Hill, these days he also regularly participates in nonviolent public actions to address climate change, economic injustice, institutionalized racism, inhumane immigration policy, oppressive violence and militarism. He lives in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California with his wife, Lisa, dog, Bogart, and sun conure parrot, Sunny.

Perhaps Why A Poet

i do not love
at all that well
though gently grasping
a wild sunflower from the stem
to wave it into hellfire
and be surprised
each time it never burns

[image: Flame Sunflower | Crystal Young]

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More about the author:

King is the host of Artivism-which explores the intersection of writers and artists with social justice activism-on Your Town television program broadcast throughout the Monterey Peninsula, California area. All royalties from King’s work are contributed to Occupy the Word Foundation, a nonprofit organization King founded to offer writers residencies and publishing opportunities to fresh, radical writers of poetry and fiction.