Andrea Hollander (1947–)

Poet and teacher Andrea Hollander served as the writer-in-residence at Lyon College in Batesville (Independence County) from 1991 to 2013. The author of four full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks, Hollander has published more than 250 poems and essays in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, Doubletake, Shenandoah, FIELD, Nimrod, and Arts & Letters. In addition, she has written book reviews for Kirkus Reviews, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Andrea Hollander was born in Berlin, Germany, on April 28, 1947, to Milton Henry, a physician stationed in France and Germany during World War II, and Blanche Rosalind Simon Hollander. She was raised in Colorado, Texas, New York, and New Jersey.

Hollander received her BS from Boston University in 1968 and her MA from the University of Colorado in 1972. She is a member of the Academy of American Poets, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and the Poetry Society of America.

She was the founding director at Open Window, a school for high school dropouts in East Boston, Massachusetts, from 1972 to 1973. In 1976, Hollander married Toddy Budy, a designer/builder, and they moved to Mountain View (Stone County), where they restored the old Commercial Hotel and transformed it into the Wildflower Bed & Breakfast. According to Johnye Strickland in her review of Hollander’s poetry collection The Other Life, Hollander “gave up a promising career in academia to relocate in a place where she could live a simpler life and be close to nature, a place that would allow her to nurture the poet within. She chose Arkansas.” The couple had a son, Brooke Sparrow Budy.

In 2011, Hollander divorced, reverted to her maiden name, and moved to Portland, Oregon, where her son lives.

Hollander’s collections include three chapbooks: Living on the Cusp, published by Moonsquilt Press in 1981; Happily Ever After, a re-imagining of certain fairytales, published by Panhandler Press in 1989; and What the Other Eye Sees, published by Wayland Press in 1991. She has published five full-length collections. House Without a Dreamer (1993) and The Other Life (2001) were both published by Story Line Press. Autumn House published Woman in the Painting in 2006 and Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2012 in 2013. In 2018, Autumn House Press released her fifth collection, Blue Mistaken for Sky. Her Pushcart Prize–winning essay The Hickeys on Sally Palermo’s Neck was published as a chapbook by Words from the Woods in 2007 and used as the common reader for freshmen at Lyon College that same year. Hollander edited When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House, 2009).

Hollander has won numerous awards, including the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize in 1993 for her debut collection, House Without a Dreamer. She won the Words Award in Poetry in 1989 and the Porter Prize in 1992. She has also received two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two from the Arkansas Arts Council, and one from Literary Arts of Oregon. In the early 1990s, she won scholarships and fellowships to the Wesleyan, Sewanee, and Bread Loaf writers’ conferences.

Hollander told Contemporary Authors Online: “In general, I write to discover and understand something about what makes humans human. I believe that good poetry ought to be both entertaining (rooted in the human traditions of making music and telling stories) and useful (capable of disturbing our lives enough to reinforce our humanness). And that is the kind of poems I try to write.”

Hollander teaches writing workshops at two literary centers in Portland: the Attic Institute of Arts & Letters and Mountain Writers Series.

For additional information:
Andrea Hollander. https://www.andreahollander.net/ (accessed August 19, 2023).

Chappell, Fred. “Review of House Without a Dreamer.” Georgia Review 48 (Winter 1994): 784–799.

Kitchen, Judith.  “When the River Is Ice: Review of Landscape with Female Figure.” Georgia Review 68, no. 2 (Summer 2014).

Meazle, Jackson. “I’d Sing It Loud: A Q&A with Andrea Hollander.” Arkansas Times, September 20, 2018, pp. 20, 31. Online at https://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/a-qanda-with-poet-andrea-hollander/Content?oid=23276670 (accessed August 19, 2023).

Scott, Whitney. “Review of House Without a Dreamer.” Booklist, November 15, 1993, p. 598.

C. L. Bledsoe
Ghoti magazine