Books

A few blocks from me, there is a church. They do meetings for people in all kinds of recovery. The name of the group is “Celebrate Recovery.”
I don’t talk much publicly about my personal life. However, I do know of people who have hit rock bottom. I have, in fact, been one, with schizophrenia.
For me and the people I’ve come to help recover, the darkness and desolation has been overwhelming. Often, too, one has lost all friendships, and perhaps even family. More often, reputation. One is socially isolated, often broke, and trying to figure out the next meal.
Down the street from the church is a gas station with a cluster of woods behind it. There lives a community of homeless people. Sometimes, I give them money. But when I don’t have a dollar to spare, I always make sure to acknowledge them, to speak to them as equals, to reassure them, and look them in the eye, if it’s not too invasive.
My chapbook is about all of this. It’s also about how the people we often see, externally, as weak, frequently turn out to be the strongest, and how people with bravado and machismo turn out to be, in reality, pitifully weak. I am calling it “A Sound Mind” because, a few years ago, when I started meditating, I chose 2 Timothy 1:7 as the idea I focused my mind on.
We never know where life may lead. I feel mostly recovered, with some limitations. But that may not always be the case.
I do not celebrate my recovery the way the church down the street seems to. It’s not a joyous song and dance. When everything–your mind, possessions, social connections–have been taken away from you, getting them back, perhaps in a different way, makes one cry and then, hopefully, help others who have lost it all. Buy Here
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Jennifer Lee Lawson took to writing. This collection of feminist, philosophical short stories were her submission to Creative Writing MFA’s. This is Lawson’s first collection of short stories made available to the public. In them, she examines the lives of several different women, all located in Florida, Lawson’s home. Each story navigates philosophical issues Lawson learned as a philosophy undergraduate and graduate student. CLICK TO PURCHASE

This book is a short collection of essays on Native American issues. Lawson studied Native American issues from a philosophical standpoint for several years in addition to having the lived experience of being a person who found herself in a colonizer’s position in life as she raised a Choctaw daughter. Because Lawson believes “the personal is the philosophical,” these essays mix the personal and the philosophical together, telling both of her personal experiences along with her philosophical acumen.

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Precisely four months before turning 40, award-winning poet Jennifer Lawson sat down one day to write a collection of poems. At her computer most of the day on June 4th 2019, Lawson penned this free verse, stream of consciousness selection. It spans quite a lot: from thinking about the age one peaks to thinking about future generations and the inspiration they may bring. This collection of poems is Lawson’s most honest, personal and intimate–from a poet who has produced hundreds of thousands of poems in her lifetime. Poems on My Way to Forty is a book for everyone.

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In the depths of recovery from schizophrenia and loneliness, Lawson crafts some of her most harrowing poems. Written during the Fall of 2019, these poems, centered around the need for human connection, lost friendship and healing, bring out Lawson’s talent.

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During the rainy season in Florida, Jennifer Lawson writes beautiful poetry about storms and intriguing insights about climate change.

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