Beth Filson

Beth Filson is a writer, poet and self-taught artist. She earned the MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa in poetry but works in multiple genres including playwrighting. Most recently Beth was awarded a writing fellowship from Hawthornden Foundation in Scotland where she gets to spend a month in a Scottish castle roaming its halls and libraries, meeting other fellows, getting to know the landscape and of course, writing. Beth has been a long time co-host of Writers Night Out with Jacqueline Sheehan and Rick Paar, a program of Straw Dog Writers Guild. She was the winner of the Wild Light Poetry contest sponsored by the Los Angeles Review and Red Hen Press, and the runner up in other contests too many times to count. Her poetry has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Compass Roads Anthology, Amherst Live Magazine, Naugatuck River Review, Meat for Tea, The Perch, and others. Beth’s one woman show, Telling the Story/Untelling the Diagnosis was produced by Pauline Productions and staged at The Blue Room in Easthampton. Her new play in progress was given a staged reading at the Lava Center last year. Beth was raised in Savannah Ga and spent most of her professional life in Atlanta working at the national and international levels to develop and implement Trauma-Informed Approaches and the reduction of seclusion and restraint in psychiatric settings. Beth is very happily at home now in Easthampton where she collects rare and of interest books, and is also a bookseller at Book Moon Books, also in Easthampton.