Carole Symer
Carole Symer is a practicing psychologist in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she works with adolescents and young adults, from whom she learns the exquisite effort it takes to language a life. Symer also teaches at New York University and has authored nearly a thousand neuropsychological evaluations to help neurodiverse learners fulfill their civil and human rights and discover more pleasure in daily life.
Symer’s essays, articles, and poems have appeared in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Across the Margin, Mutha Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, Sky Island Journal, The Passed Note, Michigan Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is the 2020 recipient of the Anne-Marie Oomen & Katey Schultz ICCA Creative Writing Scholarship. She is the author of the chapbook, Glint (Small Harbor Publishing, 2021).
Praise for Glint:
In “Glint,” Carole Symer traces the rhythm of a long love story with flashes of sights, smells, and hints of inside jokes — the way intimacy truly unfolds. By sharing it, she has given us a gift of pure pleasure.
—Monica Banks, Artist
A glint is a small flash of light; to slip, slide, or gleam; to shine with particular attention. The poems in Carole Symer’s debut chapbook, Glint, are radiant, hot blooded, self-assured, and infused with potent energy. She begins with a fragment of Sappho and ends with a standing wave. Along the way there is marriage, international adoption, food, flowers, and “the scent of human soft”. You may laugh out loud as you read this work. You will recognize honest truths.
—Holly Wren Spaulding, author of Familiars
Carole Symer's chapbook, Glint, is human and full of movement. Birdsong delivers sudden richness to moments of heartbreak, made complex with family, children, and the fleshy, full-grown perspective of the narrator. There are no half-felt emotions here, only deep wells of what it means to be alive and in relationship with others. Symer will cook you miso soup and make you think of love.
—Amber Edmondson, Poet, Book Artist, and owner of Wild Pages, Traverse City
Carole Symer’s poems wrap frames, intimate junctures and truths in which one catches the "glint" of radiant life filled with love, moments of motion, heat, and energy. Between family, children, and life’s abundance of complexity, Symer can cook or write something spicy and hot, and bring you a sweet smile.
—Ariel Sun, Designer, Artist