Eloise Bruce
Art Form(s):Artist Statement
I am engaged with the public nature of poetry and how it exists as a conversation. In a world where conversations recycle, it is important to create a new conversation with each poem. I am aiming for transformation in my reader or listener. As to the spoken aspects of my work, performing alone or with Cool Women, I am increasingly sensitive to the sounds of poetry and to how one poem resonates off another, creating a conversation that is happening because of one poem’s positioning next to another.
Artist Bio
Eloise Bruce grew up in Florida and has been a teaching artist for more than 40 years. She was the first education director for the Asolo Theatre/The State Theatre of Florida, directed for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, founded the Idaho Theatre for Youth, and was Artistic Director of Creative Theater in Princeton, NJ. In 2004 her first book of poetry, Rattle, was published by CavenKerry Press. Over the years she has had various roles at the Frost Place Center for Poetry and the Arts in Franconia, NH. She is a member of the poetry critique and performance group Cool Women and works as a teaching artist for Young Audiences NJ & Eastern PA and Writer’s Theatre of NJ. She is strongly committed to the work of Arts Integration and is a coach for the Foundation for Educators as Scholars and a consultant with YA’s Creativity Consultant Program. Bruce has worked with Poetry Out Loud in New Jersey in many capacities since its beginning. She is youth editor for RavensPerch magazine.
