Blind Poet’s Writing Brings New Beauty Into Focus

Ann-Chadwell Humphries autographs her poetry books with an embosser. She slips the clamp’s lips over the title page and squeezes the handles together.

Then she runs her fingers over the raised seal, containing her initials, her name, and the words, “In Poetry.”

Next, she uses a credit card-sized template to guide her pen so she can scrawl a personal note in a nearly straight line that she will never see. In this case, she signs the book for a reader who is working on poems again thanks to her encouragement. “You paid me a high compliment,” she writes. “You’re writing again!”

As a blind poet, she takes joy in helping someone else reconnect with the muse.

Humphries’ book is An Eclipse and a Butcher, a collection of nearly 40 poems on topics ranging from art to family life, from eclipses to blindness. She wrote and workshopped some of the poems in graduate classes at the University of South Carolina. https://www.sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2021/04/04_ann_humphries.php