Cynthia Barnes Johnson is the Featured Poet for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship’s Dickinson Poetry Series on Wednesday, November 13, at 7:00 P.M..

A retired Unitarian Universalist minister and a Baileys Harbor resident since 2000, Cynthia has published two books: A Theophany, Please (1995) and The Way Crows Really Fly (2004).  Three of her poems inspired Beverly McLarry to compose choral works: Ice Floes, No Deer Is Enough, and Illusion.  Cynthia’s poems have also been published in Beyond Absence: A Treasury of Poems, Quotations, and Readings on Death and Remembrance, Edward Searl, editor, Skinner House, 2006; and The Light Beyond, an ebook edited by Lucie Storrs in England, 2007.  Her poetry has been published in the Door Voice, Door County Advocate and the Peninsula Pulse.  Cynthia was part of Midsummer’s Music Festival performance of “Seven Last Words of Christ” in March 2010 with her poem “A Reader Probes the Text.” She is a member of Word Women and revels in the creative energy of Door County poets.

A poet since childhood, Cynthia has written hundreds of poems and is enjoying the challenge of deciding which poems to read on November 13.  She is revisiting all the poems she has written, looking for “the zing when we suddenly feel, ah, that’s it when encountering something that feels piercingly true”.  Cynthia explains, “This is a phrase I’ve been thinking about in terms of how to discern truth for ourselves in the multiplicity of sources we encounter in the living of our lives. I’m hoping to gain a new perspective on words I have written over many decades.”

Cynthia has invited Jane Sommers, pastor of United Methodist congregations in Egg Harbor and Baileys Harbor, to provide a musical perspective to the evening.