Verses Penned While Down from the Stars

Stella Muse Whitehead (1890-1979)'s poetry has appeared in publications in the U.S. and abroad. The Japanese magazine "The Study of Current English" featured her poems with Japanese translations. She was Mississippi's Poet Laureate. In 1963 she published "Viewpoints." She and son Richard researched the life of early Georgia governor Samuel Elbert. She married Lloyd Howell Cobb Whitehead and raised four children, doing clerical work in the Great Depression. Anna Virginia Farquhar Whitehead (Virginia F. Whitehead, 1924-2011) as a child admired the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, and planned a career in astronomy. She was a scholarship student at Smith College during World War Two, where, despite New England's cloudy conditions, she majored in astronomy, completing observations of, and a thesis on, variable stars. She served as civil air raid warden. She worked for the Department of Defense, then at Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, where she collected more data on "variable stars" and hiked. From Mount Hamilton, she moved to White Sands, New Mexico, to work for RCA (today Lockheed/United Space Alliance) in the early missile program. There she met her husband. The couple lived for a while on a sailboat, "The Sea Queen", navigating the Gulf of Mexico. She later worked in door-to-door sales, and as a teacher (in Merritt Island and Cocoa Beach), store clerk, and engineer. "Blackbird" (PAW, 1956- ), the first of four children, grew up beside the Banana River. She adored Yeats and Blake as a child, but the initial influence on her verse was Poe. Later she was drawn to Plath. Today she enjoys Tolkien. She loves the nature writing of her grandmother. She is a course shy of a bachelor's degree in art. She has collected data for the phone directory, and has also worked as a babysitter (as a teen), a waitress, a floral arranger, a delivery truck driver, a store clerk. She has three children. CE Whitehead (1957- ) was a middle child. She learned Spanish at age six, from classmates and a discarded textbook. Like her three fellow poets, she began writing poetry in grade school. In college she studied the sestina and other verse forms in preparation for doing verse translations of troubadours. She then abandoned English verse in order to focus on the troubadours. She worked part-time. She earned a master's degree. She has worked odd jobs (clerk, fast food worker, teacher, writer, technology assistant, dish washer, security guard, farm worker, call center worker).