Wendy Klein studied drama and English at the University of Utah and San Francisco State University before leaving the U.S. in 1964.  With a young child in tow she gypsied around Europe for several years, living in Sweden, France and Germany.  She worked as a secretary when she was hungry, thanks to her sensible stepmother who frogmarched her off to summer school at 16 to learn to type.  In 1971 she came to England.  With three children to care for, she earth-mothered until 1973 when economics forced her into the workplace as every kind of skivvy from file clerk to press secretary, assistant bookshop manager and co-administrator of a small theatre in education company. At the sticky end of a second marriage it became imperative to earn a grown-up living, and she qualified first as a social worker (1983), then as a family and couples psychotherapist (1992), an occupation she has pursued until her recent semi-retirement.

Wendy began to write again seriously 8 years ago.  She completed the Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing at Oxford University in 2000, and the Post Graduate Diploma in Modern and Contemporary Poetry in English at Oxford Brookes University in 2006.  Her only novel, Listening for Nightingales, was published in 2002, after which time she has concentrated on poetry, consolidated by a year’s course in ‘Versification’ at the Poetry School.  Her work is published in journals and magazines including Mslexia, The Jewish Quarterly, Magma, Smiths Knoll, Poetry Nottingham, The Interpreter's House and The River Thames in Verse and will appear in Envoi (Autumn 2007).  

Her first poetry collection, Cuba in the Blood, was published by Cinnamon Press in February 2009. She has had many commended poems in competition anthologies including Blinking Eye, Cinnamon Press and Vision On 2003.  She is a Troubadour regular and featured in a New Voices event (May 2005) along with being a monthly reader at ‘Poets’ Café’, Reading and a member for 6 years of Susan Utting’s weekly poetry group in Reading,

She is a passionate believer in the curative powers of dogs, belly dancing, and reading poetry out loud.  She hopes someone will humanely destroy her if she ceases to be able to enjoy these pleasures.

e-mail Wendy

Wendy Klein
website

poetry favourites:
Coffee House
Poetry;
Two Rivers Press;
The Poetry School;
Magma Poetry Online

 and shop elsewhere:
collection -
"Cuba in the Blood",
Cinnamon Press

© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
site feedback welcome