ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Justin Spring’s 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 six other collections of poems, Polaroid Poems, Other Dancers, Nursery Raps, Poems for Family and Friends and Poems of Sarasota and Florida. Mr. Spring is also one of a handful of poets in the country who compose in the ancient oral mode. His seven SOULSPEAK Studio 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 three prose works:
SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul is a ground breaking CD/book combination intended for anyone interested in attaining the deep artistic and spiritual expression possible through SOULSPEAK.
Alice Hickey: Between Worlds is a fascinating, sometimes troubling story about two strangers flung together by inexplicable psychic forces that lead them on a long, dizzying journey into the roots of human consciousness, the psychic roots of poetry, and the mysterious Mother Goddess cultures.
Mirrors is a short memoir of Mr. Spring’s encounter with the pidgin poetry of the Australian aborigine, Eldred Van-Ooy. Mr. Spring describes the encounter as leaving him in a mysterious garden, wondering, looking up at the leaves.
River Mother: The Face of the Sphinx: is the story of a young Nubian female shaman/leader whose face becomes the face of the Sphinx. It is set in Neolithic Nubia and the Nile delta. The time is 6000 BC, three thousand years before the rise of Dynastic Egypt.
In 6000 BC, both Nubia and Egypt were both green and not the deserts they are today. Both areas were inhabited by preliterate hunter-gatherer tribes who lived in a highly psychic world governed by unpredictable Mother Goddesses—as were all preliterate peoples around the world. We also now know that their consciousness was much different from ours, being highly psychic in nature, and that their actions were not decided by logic—as ours are—but by voices and visions.
It is in this setting that the story of River Mother unfolds. It is told by River Mother herself. She begins by describing her birth and early life in a hunter/gatherer tribe in Nubia followed by her later shamanic training and prophetic visions that eventually take her on a dangerous and extraordinary journey to the Nile delta only to find that her Mother Goddess beliefs clash with those of the more male-oriented Semitic tribes coming down from the north.
She rises to that challenge by becoming a great visionary leader who brings those conflicting male/female beliefs into harmony. In doing this, River Mother establishes the key spiritual values—Balance and Order—that will guide not only prehistoric Proto-Egypt but also Dynastic Egypt.
Her tremendous impact on the spiritual and physical lives of the delta’s inhabitants eventually bring them to honor her as a living Goddess by carving her face on a rocky outcropping on the Giza plateau—an outcropping that was gradually transformed over the next 3500 years into what we now know as the Great Sphinx of Giza.
Click here too visit is a companion web site to the book, When Was the Sphinx Really Built and Why
Mr. Spring is also the founder of SOULSPEAK, an organization dedicated to bringing poetry back into the everyday lives of everyday people. He is also the originator, along with Scylla Liscombe, of a simplified version of ancient oral antiphonal poetry he calls SOULSPEAK
Mr. Spring was educated at Columbia College, has three children, and divides his time between Mexico and Sarasota, Florida.