About Linda Drattell
Biography
Linda Drattell is a poet and writer who lives in Northern California and Barcelona. She has also lived and worked in three world capitals on three continents and draws from her lifetime of experiences to inform her writing. She earned a bachelor’s degree in social work from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an MBA from the American University in Washington, D.C. Deafened in her thirties, she relearned how to navigate social, professional, and family relationships, and has chronicled this process through articles in newsletters, magazines, and in a poetry anthology. She has worked in peer support services, community relations, and as an advocate for the deaf and hard of hearing.
Completing a full-length work of fiction which she hopes one day will be published, Linda looked for a way to fill her time while awaiting each rejection letter and began writing poetry; childhood memories of her parents joyfully reciting poems reignited her love of the art form. Her poems have been published online and in print with various anthologies and literary magazines, including Prompt for the Press, Bubble Literary Magazine, Viewless Wings Publisher, six Wingless Dreamer anthologies, two Las Positas College anthologies, two California Writers Club anthologies, Bad Dreams Good Dreams and Mark Drolsbaugh’s On the Fence: The Hidden World of the Hard of Hearing anthologies.
Her poetry collection, Remember This Day, was published in 2023 by Finishing Line Press. A second poetry collection, The Lighter Side of Horse Manure, will be published in 2024, also by Finishing Line Press. Who Wants to be Friends With a Dragon? – a children’s book she co-wrote– was also published in 2023 by Dorrance Publishing Company. An excerpt from her unpublished adult novel is an Embark finalist, and a flash fiction piece was short-listed for the Loft Books 2023 prize.
Linda’s aging horse and goats provide muses for many of her poems. She is a long-distance runner and writes poems of her experiences passing through local parks. Writing also has helped her overcome trauma; caught in the middle of a terror attack in 2016 in Nice, France, writing enabled her to process that event’s impact on her life.
Linda serves as a board member of both the California Communication Access Foundation and the California Writers Club/Tri-Valley Writers Branch. Please connect with her on X (formerly known as Twitter) @LindaDrattell, on LinkedIn and Facebook.
