POET.
PLAYWRIGHT.
STORYTELLER.

Lover of the written word.

Paola Bruni is a commercial writer who spent decades fundraising for at-risk youth, education, the arts and end-of-life care for adults and children. She is now dedicated to expressing her unique creative voice through the art of poetry, playwriting, and narrative fiction and nonfiction.

She is two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and her awards include the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize and the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize. She was also a recent finalist for the Mudfish Poetry Prize.

Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in, such prestigious journals as The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, The Birmingham Review, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, Comstock Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, and elsewhere.

Paola’s short plays have been produced by Actor’s Theater, Santa Cruz, California and short-listed for international play festivals. She is also co-author of the nonfiction book, Let God Love You Up published by The Maria Press (2015).

  JUST RELEASED!

‘how do you spell the sound of crickets’
by Paola Bruni & Jory Post

 

 
 
 
 
 

wrote Jory Post to Paola Bruni as he was dying of inoperable cancer.
Hence, the quiet conversation ensued
—one poet to another—
an intimate sharing of hopes, fears, and grief.

“The me as a poet hunts for more ways to stay alive than he does chasing or trying to understand death. What’s to understand?”

 “…I still startle awake in the middle of the night expecting the elemental to wave its wand of reduction. Aren’t we always waltzing between something and nothing?”

 

REVIEWS

 

“This compelling collection of epistolary exchanges invites us into a relationship two poets have formed as one is slowly dying of cancer. So begins a conversation that becomes necessary to both. With Neruda as a guide they gather in the emptiness around them with the open living hands of friendship and poetry.”

—Dorianne Laux, Pulitzer Prize Nominee and author of Only As the Day is Long

 
 

“Poets Paola Bruni and Jory Post created a book both rapturous and melancholy, a monument to the creative urge, to poetry, and to the music of two voices singing in harmony. Their poems speak with great affection and candor, and carry the reader along on their intimate, revealing journey.”

—Gary Young,
author of No Other Life

“In this brief epistolary collection, poets Paola Bruni and Jory Post confront mortality. Whether through humor, deep reflection, shared grief, or the sometimes-uneasy bond of those who contemplate our finitude, these poets offer a bold fiat that fully embraces both the blessing and the curse of inhabiting a human body.”

—Frank Paino, author of Obscura

 
 

“How do you spell the sound of crickets is both full of life and deeply moving. You will be won over by the voices of Jory Post and Paola Bruni, in earnest dialogue. But it’s what they each do with poetry that will stay with you. They "make it new." They invent it once more in one of its earliest forms: as a healing art.”

—Ken Weisner, author of Anything on Earth and Cricket to Star

 

“In this astonishing, co-authored book, we encounter brave and playful wordsmithery. We are swept along by imagination, though the specter of Jory’s approaching death colors the scintillating game. This is not a book of goodbyes, but hellos to all that’s unknown and it revels in how much we can open to other worlds, even if we have to leave this one.”

 —David Allen Sullivan, Poet Laurette of Santa Cruz County and author of Black Butterflies Over Baghdad

 

MEDIA

“Skillfully curated to whet the appetite, this suite of poems dives deeply into the cares, dreams, peculiarities, and inmost unknowables of two minds (two spirits), giving generously to each other…each line hammered into sparks by the poets’ mission to lengthen time, to beat the clock, to work against grim odds.”

Read Full Article

—Christina Waters, Phd, author of Inside the Flame

 
 

‘Let’s do this, 50 poems before I’m gone’

How two writers explored life, faced death.

Read Full Article

—Wallace Baine, Look Out Santa Cruz

 PUBLISHED POETRY &
AWARD-WINNING SHORT PLAYS

 

 INTERVIEWS & PAST READINGS

 

Massachusetts Review: 10 Questions

 

Santa Cruz Writes

The Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium Reading

 
 

Zoom Forward!
54 In Celebration of the Muse