A Lake of Light and Clouds (Press 53) is award-winning poet Terri Kirby Erickson's fourth collection of poetry, and was recently launched to an audience of 250 people, including legendary author John Ehle, award-winning actress Rosemary Harris, and Emmy and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, Ron Powers, who gave the inspiring Introduction to Erickson's reading.Her third collection, In the Palms of Angels (Press 53) won the Gold Medal for Poetry in the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. It was also a 2012 Nautilus Silver Award winner for poetry that "engenders compassion, wisdom, greater understanding, empathy, or passion through the artful use of language." And it was one of four Finalists in the 2013 International Book Awards.Her second collection, Telling Tales of Dusk, was #23 on the Poetry Foundation's Contemporary Best Sellers list in 2010. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals, anthologies and other publications, including Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, the 2013 Poet's Market, The Christian Science Monitor, storySouth, Eclectica, JAMA, the North Carolina Literary Review, Verse Daily and many others. Her awards include first place honors from the North Carolina Poetry Society, the Carteret Writers, Carolina Woman Magazine, and the Writers' Ink Guild, and she was one of eleven international winners of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize in 2011. The cover of A Lake of Light and Clouds and her other books, as well, were painted by her uncle, internationally acclaimed artist Stephen White, whose work has been exhibited at MoMA. Please visit her website at www.terrikirbyerickson.com, for more information.