Ann Medlock

Ann Medlock

nn Medlock has been a writer, editor, publicist, teacher, speaker, actress, radio commentator and speechwriter. Now her work has expanded to include, “poet.”

Her background includes editing Viet Nam Presse in Saigon, and teaching in Japan and the Congo. In the US she has written articles for Look, The New York Times, The Journal of Commerce, Editor & Publisher, Working Woman, Lear’s, CoEvolution Quarterly, New Age Journal and Education Week; counseled major corporations on using media; developed textbooks, and edited the Children's Express news service. She wrote ad copy and annual reports to pay the rent on her Central Park West apartment, plus speeches for US political figures and for the Aga Khan. Never in all that writing did she publish poems. But she was writing them.

In the 1980s, concerned that too few people were actively participating in this democracy, she launched the Giraffe Heroes Project to inspire people to stick their necks out for the common good.

In 2003, Medlock looked up and noticed that a giraffe had eaten the last couple decades of her life. Writing heroes’ stories was great work but there were these poems piling up in her desk drawers, and they began clamoring to be released.

Being an experienced editor, graphic designer, and publisher of books for the Project and an impatient autocrat, she leap-frogged over the usual slow process of petitioning for publication and produced Arias, Riffs & Whispers, Words Written for Voices, a “beautifully printed” book of 70 poems.

Readers move with her through an extraordinary life, seen from a vantage point of wisdom, humor and grace. A dead tiger is dumped on a Saigon sidewalk; John Singer Sargent’s subjects talk to each other; Mother Nature plays trickster; blue-eyed interlopers are evicted from the Congo; a Puerto Rican data clerk gives voice to the lost in the Trade Center; Lenin, Jesus and Calvin Klein collide in Red Square—it’s quite a ride.

Now living on an island in the Pacific Northwest, Ann Medlock is doing readings from the pages of Arias, Riffs & Whispers, her experience on radio, on stages and on podiums coming into play before rapt listeners, many of whom say they’ve been turned off by poetry, “but this is interesting.” Laughter, sighs and tears are not uncommon.

Several interviews with Ann Medlock are available online. One was done by the Global Ethics Institute. In 1998 Ann won the Caring Institute's Caring Award and was interviewed for their magazine. She also was a "Soul Guest" on Gary Zukav's website and she was named an education innovator by the NEA. She's been interviewed by Time, Parade, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, Good Morning America, Lifetime, and innumerable other broadcast and print outlets, all of which control the rights to their materials, so they can't be posted here. An interview with Ann ran in a now-defunct magazine called Personal Transformation.

Next up from Ann Medlock—a novel of New York in the ‘60s, working title: Walking the Mermaid. In the queue behind that: The Book of the House, pictures and words about building with Christopher Alexander and living in the resulting Pattern Language house.

Personal Info