Dr.Sandra Lynn Hutchison is the author of two books of poetry: The Art of Nesting (GR Books) and a forthcoming volume, The Beautiful Foolishness of Things, which was a finalist for the Poet’s Corner Chapbook Contest in 2021. She is also the author of a memoir entitled Chinese Brushstrokes (Turnstone Press) and numerous essays as well as academic articles. Her stories have been anthologized in a variety of publications, including Chinese Ink, Western Pen: The Oxford Anthology of Stories About China (Oxford University Press).

Hutchison holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in English literature, with a specialization in modern and contemporary poetry. She has been the recipient of various

academic and literary awards, including a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship, an Emily Dickinson Poetry Prize from Universities West Press, and a Jane Kenyon Poetry Scholarship from Bennington College, where she worked with Pitt Poetry Series editor Ed Ochester and poet April Barnard to refine her craft as a poet.

For six years, Hutchison served as poetry editor for Maine’s foremost literary journal. Puckerbrush Review. Since 2015, she has served as editor-in-chief of elixir-journal.org, an online journal of the arts she founded to showcase work that celebrates the power of spirit as it shows itself in the natural world, in works of art, and in communities of striving.

In her translation work, Hutchison has drawn on her skill as a poet to adapt work by mystical poets such as Rumi and the nineteenth-century Persian poet and suffragist Tahirih. Most recently, her translation work has focused on the prison poems of Mahvash Sabet.

Hutchison lives in Orono, Maine and teaches online through the Wilmette Institute, offering courses in creative writing as well as scriptural exegesis. She also serves as a faculty for the BIHE (Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education), an unofficial online university created to serve Bahá’í youth who are barred from Iran’s public universities because of their religion. In her BIHE writing courses, she works with Iranian youth who are silenced by the current regime, helping them to set down stories which she then shares in elixir-journal.org