Gina Malone
Writer, Poet, Storyteller
Featured Work
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stands for Christ whom Lula sought all her life, she who sat with back as upright as a pew, who recited Bible verses as if she were their author, who in her widowhood went to the auction house with her tobacco bales, stood with fingers crossed and closed her eyes in long blinks, praying the
same prayer she prayed always: Help me do this, Lord. Help me.
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Kakalak 2023
From The Family Album of Star-Crossed Lovers
In the photograph, black-haired Minnie Ruth sits
on a motorcycle, her pretty, young arms clasped
round Ryan Edwin, tall and not quite smiling,
his hands fists on the bars.
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Lanier Library Poetry Prize 2021
Creating Believable Characters: A Master Class
I mean, if you think about it, She can be anywhere, God can,
And so She might have taken a class with the Writing Teacher
Who says Make your characters suffer. Threaten them
With death. Challenge their views of themselves, of the world.
Pull the rug out from under their feet so they hit the floor hard
And sprawl there afraid for a time to stand up again. Hold knives
To their throats, guns to their heads. Watch them cringe. See
What your characters do then, what they say. Make them real
By making them suffer.
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At Buttermilk Creek
The crow on a bridge railing
in this city park presides
over Autumn.
Knife-carved letters
are hieroglyphs beneath
his deliberate feet.
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Why My Father Cannot Lay a Stone Wall
Nearly eighty now he drags out the soft
middles of words when he plunders his past, sweeping disparate bits into piles his voice steps around. I always wanted to learn how to build stone walls, he says.
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Kakalak 2025
Milkweed
There will come a day in Autumn when the pods
open like eyes and weep into the wind little brown
teardrops that do not fall to the earth without first
being borne by strands of silken hair, white like mine,
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Poetry South 2018
Beginning Again
She could not recall
ever having ironed
while angry before,
but how cathartic
to push hot metal hard
against the soft cotton shirt
with its pretty pattern,
clusters of muted cherries;
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See Upcoming Appearances
October 6th 2026, Peace Frog Poetry Soiree, 7PM at Dimension of Books
635 S. Haywood Street
Waynesville, NC
About Gina Malone
As a child, I loved books so fervently that I wanted to create stories and poems myself. When I was nine, Santa Claus, believing in me as much as I did in myself, left a little, blue typewriter under the Christmas tree. I have since won awards for newspaper feature writing, poetry, flash fiction and short stories, but have yet to write the novel or collection of poems I would want to find wrapped in red or green tissue paper on Christmas morning. The rest of my life will be spent trying, enjoying every moment that I roam the creative forests of my mind.
For nearly 20 years I owned and ran a small bookstore selling secondhand books in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a “job” that allowed me to raise my two daughters while working, to surround them and myself with books we loved, to talk about literature with fellow book-lovers, and to gather enough ideas for characters for the rest of my writing life. Publications in which my work has appeared include North Carolina Literary Review, ൪uartet, Kakalak, Poetry South and Streetlight.
