Penelope Simison
Penelope Simison (PS) studied English and history in college, but her passion has always been cities — how they’re built and how they function. She segued out of teaching and into journalism, focusing on Los Angeles urban affairs. Eventually she left newspapers and transformed her “beat” into a career, working as an urban planner in Los Angeles and in the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. She has graduate degrees in history and urban planning. All these careers, as well as the people she met along the way, has fed her poetry, which she believes exposes the crux of life’s experiences and burnishes them with language. Her poetry has been published in Bridges. When she’s not writing or reading poetry, she reads (mostly history, politics and mysteries), goes to the theater, quilts, cooks, frets about her clematis and daffodils, and watches the Cubs win.
