Art Type

by Carol Shamon

Carol Shamon

Carol Shamon, a long-time poet and journal keeper, lives in San Diego, CA. While in college, she contributed to several publications, including Colorado-North Review and Poetry-North Review. Post-college, she attended the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics for two summers, studying with Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. After a thirty-year pause to create children and a thriving talent agent business, she is excited to dedicate more time to writing.  Her first chapbook, “Stronger Than Salmon,” from Finishing Line Press, was published in 2024. Her zine “Oh The Water” was published in 2023. In 2020, Irrelevant Press published her zine “A Different More-Creating and Embracing Change While Aging.” Other recent poems appear in Seedlings, Harrow House Journal, Summation, Relevant Poetry, Spillwords, RedRoseThorns, The San Diego Poets Annual, and A Year in Ink. She is currently working on her memoir “The Decade House.”

praise for Art Type

In Art Type, Carol Shamon traces the poet’s journey from silencing her words to reclaiming her voice. When “nothing has to happen/and everything can happen,” creative possibility blooms. Written with sensitivity and beautiful clarity, this collection serves as both invitation and incantation – an urgent plea beckoning readers to surrender to their deepest creative selves and embrace the transformative act of making art. 

- Judy Reeves, author When Your Heart Says Go

Welcome, fortunate reader, to the unveiling of the “secret work” that poet Carol Shamon reveals is “brewing on (her) tongue” in her latest poetry collection, Art Type. Shamon’s strong, vivid poems serve as poignant reminders that, for artists, even when our creative life seems to have slipped away, a rejuvenating river of inspiration may be silently coursing through us. As she eloquently writes, these “secret builders / have been at work...making yet another door.” In Art Type, Shamon shares her own courageous paths to inspiration from a poet who doesn’t “want to be careful anymore.” She grants the reader this same bravery and freedom. Immerse yourself in this potent exploration of the ways we each may invite and make generous room for our own muse and discover that juicy inner place where “nothing has to happen / and everything can happen.”

- Judyth Hill, poet, chair of PEN International Women Writers Committee