CONTACT: Email Donna at donnatrussell at gmail dot com.
A fifth-g
eneration Texan, Trussell now lives in Kansas City, where her husband works as a theater critic for The Kansas City Star.
Currently Trussell blogs on AOL’s Politics Daily in the column Woman Up and she also co-authors a political cartoon column with her husband. In the past she’s worked as an editor, film critic and teacher.
Trussell’s fiction and poetry have appeared in North American Review, Poetry, Chicago Review and other journals.
Her short story Fishbone, first published in TriQuarterly in 1989, has been was widely and internationally anthologized. The story was also performed as a play at Seattle’s Book It! Theatre and as a monologue by Arts & Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art.
In 2008 her collection of 25 years of poetry What’s Right About What’s Wrong was published by Helicon Nine, and in 2009 the book won the Thorpe Menn Award.
“Each [poem] is a compact little rock of Texas Gothic, thrown hard. Think Flannery O’Connor in verse, with less God and more rodeo.” So said reviewer Melinda Henneberger in Slate.com’s list of best books of 2008, which included What’s Right About What’s Wrong:
Even before Trussell was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2001 — she got the call telling her to report for surgery while watching the Twin Towers fall — her work, as she says, “tended toward death, death, pet death, sex, love, death.”
But fierce or yearning, I love these ghosts — like Miss Candace Mayes, who surrendered her place in the last lifeboat off the Titanic to a mother who died years later of guilt, in an asylum where “Her hands would climb the trellis. Her feet were never still.” Of a daughter never conceived who calls, “[G]ive me your darkest winter, it will be spring to me.” And of a poet read posthumously, who can’t help asking: Who are you? What do you do? Tell me, is the sun out?
In 2006 Trussell’s outspoken essay Remember Me as a Writer, Not a Survivor on her struggle to regain ground lost to the trauma of illness, was published in Newsweek.
She had assumed her abysmal survival statistics would make emotional adjustment unnecessary, since death would soon upset the game board. But, as luck would have it, her remission held and Trussell began to write again.
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Hey Donna, I was trying to track you down and found this website. Beautiful! You know, things happen, people get lost in daily trivialities, and then one day they wake up and realize too much time has passed. I hope this little note finds you and we reconnect–if not, I’ll keep trying.
Hi Donna
Just wanted to say hello from the Midwest- from one clear cell ovarian cancer survivor to another! (Yes, it is quite lonely out there, but I’ve met 3 of us in person.)
I’ve read your posts on ACOR and your essay published in Newsweek. Now I look forward to reading your poems.
When I get my website up again, I’ll let you know. It has been on my to do list. Your blog is inspiring.
BTW: I want to be remembered as a photographer.
Hi Julianne. Thank you for your kind words. Do let me know when your photos are up.
WordPress has software for photo-bloggers. It’s called Cutline. If you click on Tabbie’s Garden on my bookmarks to the right, you can see an example. The format is nice and simple.
Re remembered as a writer: And irony of ironies, if I’m remembered at all, it will probably be as a “cancer writer.” Ha!
But I’m just thrilled to be alive. To the uninitiated: Clear cell is supposedly the most aggressive and most chemo-resistant of the roughly 35 subtypes of ovarian cancer.
For the record, my oncologist never did agree with the experts on clear cell’s mean reputation. And today I am seven years out and, as far as we know, cancer free.
Dear Donna Trussel
We have read your story Fishbone in our english classes and we would like to know where you got your inspiration from?
also we thought about why Wanda gives her baby such special names? (Fishbone, Logarithm and so)
We have talked about for instance which “images”, symbols you have used and what they mean.
At last we want you to know that it was a good and interesting text with a good message.
We hope the hear from you
Friendly regards
- Mie, Kristine, Luna and Carina
Hello students! Thank you for writing to me. See my blog post Looking for America:
http://donnatrussell.com/2008/11/07/looking-for-america/
A great resource for a young writer with cancer- thank you!
why u iterested in Iran?
Re Iran: My heart goes out to the protesters. They want good government, and good relations with the rest of the world, and many are willing to die for that cause. What’s not to like?