Dr Q

Dr Q is a nom de plume. She has painted since the age of five, read voraciously from a summer mobile library at her elementary school, graduated high school at sixteen, and traveled with other artists and musicians in a beat-up van decades before “van life” entered the language. She studied poetry at Cambridge, took a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Flagler College, holds master’s degrees in Practical Psychology and Practical Theology and a Doctorate of Theology from Maranatha Christian College; she has performed stand-up comedy on the Sunset Strip.

She escaped an abusive marriage that turned homicidal; the threat has followed her since, across decades and many moves, which is why she does not reveal where she lives and writes under a chosen name. Between then and now she has worked chicken farms and tobacco fields, retail management, family portrait photography, and fundraising for volunteer fire departments; she has served as a victims advocate in a state attorney’s office, in domestic violence shelters, with homeless people, and on mission trips ministering to Sudanese refugees in Egypt.

Her published collections move between the tender pastoral of Poems From My Panda Loving Heart and the trauma-witness verse of Stolen Diamonds, Lost Rubies; the warmest and the bleakest of her registers, both drawn from her direct experience among the people most of the world walks past. The books are available in paperback on Amazon; the poems themselves are here, free, for anyone who wants them.