About the Author

Jan Shoemaker grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. Shortly after finishing her B.A. in English at Michigan State University, she moved to Seattle where she waited tables at the Pike Place Market and wrote poems while she rode ferries around Puget Sound. In the years that followed, she wrote poems while waitressing on the Maine coast and in Rhode Island. Eventually, she returned to East Lansing to be closer to her family and make a career in education.

She has been teaching high school in mid-Michigan for twenty-seven years, first for the Diocese of Lansing and currently at a public high school outside the city. She sees her real imprint on her school's curriculum in the World's Religions class affording her students field trips to synagogues and churches and mosques, as well as a Hindu Temple, and a Buddhist monastery. She is a recipient of the Greater Lansing United Nation Association's Loy LaSalle Award for outstanding contributions to Global Education and International Understanding. In addition to teaching, she is a part-time bookseller at independently owned and run Schuler Books in Okemos, Michigan.

Her work has been featured on public radio, anthologized, and published in many magazines and journals including River Teeth, The Sun, Fourth Genre, Colorado Review, Upstreet, and Sufi Journal. She earned an MFA at Ashland University. This is her first book.

Reviews

Jan Shoemaker may be the finest crafter of sentences working in the essay today. Her prose displays remarkable humor and wit, an intelligence that never grows brittle because it is based on a lively reading and teaching life and placed in the service of life's imponderable questions. Her probing of our common mysteries and her affection for others opens great depths of feeling as well. In Flesh and Stones heart and mind and words meet. --Steven Harvey, author of a memoir, The Book of Knowledge and Wonder