Celestine Woo has been a modern dancer for thirty years, as well as a choreographer and dance club advisor.  She is also a professor of English and French, and teaches both high school and college at Bard High School Early College in Newark, NJ.  She has published a book on Shakespeare performance as well as a chapbook of poetry (Burnished Sol, Pudding House 2009), and numerous poems in journals.

In Frost Fair Dance, Celest Woo concerns herself with what it means to move, literally and figuratively, through internal and external geographies. Using modern dance as both a lens and a framing device, in lines that embody the precisely crafted freedoms that give modern dance its power, these poems engage the different ways bodies travel through physical space. Woo’s metaphors both capture and open up for further exploration how that movement reflects, shapes and is shaped by the interior space we move through in order to learn who we are: how we lay claim, in other words, to what it means to be alive on this planet.

                                                                                     ~Richard Jeffrey Newman, poet, essayist, and translator

                                                                                        www.richardjnewman.com