Justin Spring is a prize-winning poet, video artist, and writer of fiction and non-fiction. He is one of the few poets who works not only in the written mode of composition but also in a contemporary version of preliterate oral poetry called SOULSPEAK—of which he and fellow poet Scylla Liscombe are the originators.
He is also the sole originator of an allied video form called SOULSPEAK DREAMSTORIES. He considers his work in the oral and audio/visual area to be pioneering.
Mr. Spring is the founder of SOULSPEAK, an organization dedicated to bringing poetry back into the everyday lives of everyday people. He was educated at Columbia College, has three children, and lives in Mexico and the United States.
Mr. Spring’s written poems have been published in American Poetry Review, as well as numerous anthologies such as Florida in Poetry. He is the recipient of many prizes and honors and is the author of seven collections of poems, Polaroid Poems, Other Dancers, Nursery Raps, Talkies, Poems for Family and Friends, Poems of Sarasota and Florida, Collected Poems 1985-2014
Mr. Spring is one of a handful of poets in the country who compose in the ancient oral mode. His seven SOULSPEAK oral poetry CDs are: Gathering, Smoke, Nursery Raps, Speakings, In Your Mind, Witnesses Log, I’m Talking to You Oprah.
Mr. Spring is also the author of four prose works:
SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul: a ground breaking CD/book combination intended for anyone interested in attaining the deep spiritual expression possible through SOULSPEAK. It also contains a unique look at poetry going back to the earliest preliterate cultures.
Alice Hickey: Between Worlds: is a fast-paced, lightly fictionalized, sometimes troubling memoir of a seven year period in which the author and psychic Alice Hickey try to unwind a skein of bewildering psychic events that threaten to unseat the author. That effort sends them ricocheting back and forth between Sarasota, Tavernier Key, Panama, Santa Monica, Sedona, and the San Blas Islands and then, finally, back in time to the dawn of the human race. This is a totally new look at the roots of human consciousness, the psychic roots of poetry, the early Mother Goddess period, and our constantly evolving consciousness, but even more, it is a moving story about a deep friendship that blossomed unexpectedly on the unruly border between the two worlds.
Mirrors: a short memoir of Mr. Spring’s mysterious encounter with the pidgin poems of Eldred Van-Ooy, an Australian aborigine, an encounter he describes as having left him in a shadowy garden, wondering, looking up at the leaves
River Mother: The Face of the Sphinx: is a novel set in the Mother Goddess period of Neolithic, preliterate Nubia. In it, River Mother tells of her life—from her birth to her early training as a Nubian shaman to the prophetic vision that drove her to travel to the Nile delta—where her spiritual leadership and prophecies not only established the unique male/ female balance central to all Egyptian spirituality but also helped save the Nile delta tribes from the great tsunami caused by the eruption of Mt Aetna in 6000 B.C.. Her powerful leadership eventually led the people of the delta to honor her as a living Goddess by carving her face onto a rocky outcropping that was gradually transformed over the next 3500 years into what we now know as the Great Sphinx of Giza.
Mr. Spring’s aim in creating this story was to give readers a better knowledge of the artistic, spiritual, and highly psychic nature of the much neglected, preliterate Proto-Egyptian culture that he contends had a cohesive spiritual and intellectual center whose interests were totally different from ours, and yet powerful enough to give birth to the complex spiritual/psychic concepts and practices that eventually came to maturity thousands of years later in Dynastic Egypt.
Click here to visit a companion web site to the book, When Was the Sphinx Really Built and Why .
Among the recent poetry prizes and honors Mr. Spring has received are: