Autistic attorney and college writing teacher Signe E. Land will be featured this week at Wednesday Night Poetry at Kollective Coffee+Tea, 110 Central Ave.
The regular open mic for all poets begins at 6:30 p.m. Land will perform at 7 p.m., followed by a second round of open mic. Wednesday Night Poetry is free and open to all ages.
Land, who calls both Minnesota and Hot Springs home, earned a Bachelor of Arts in Writing and Latin, a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and a Juris Doctorate from William Mitchell College of Law -- graduating valedictorian -- all while an undiagnosed autistic woman.
"I began writing when I was a small child. I had trouble with sensory overload and coping with the world around me. So I retreated into reading and writing alone in my room," she said in a news release.
After receiving her MFA in 1996, Land quit writing. "I froze my heart so I could live in a world for which I had no reference, no bearing, no way to cope as an undiagnosed woman on the autism spectrum. I wrote academically and practiced law," she said.
"I could not read people so I ended up in emotionally dangerous and abusive relationships with no way to advocate for myself. But I have a voice now after a quarter-century of silence. I now write poetry and I'm working on a memoir about growing up, living and working as an undiagnosed woman on the autism spectrum."
A member of ETA SIGMA PHI National Honor Society, Land has taught creative writing at St. Olaf College and at the University of Minnesota. "I have a keen love of language. Besides Latin I also speak French and am learning Spanish" she said. "In undergraduate school, while translating Latin poetry, I had the opportunity to study the structure and scansion of Latin poetry and gained an appreciation for formal verse. This carried over into my study of poetry in my MFA program."
Entertainment on 12/11/2018