Alazar Press on the passing of Eloise Greenfield
by Rosemarie Gulla, Publisher Alazar Press
Alazar Press is so grateful that Eloise Greenfield has been in the world and her words will be here still. Over the last two decades, I’ve had the privilege of working with Eloise Greenfield and sharing her poetry and stories with school systems, students, teachers and families. What a difference she has made in the lives of so many children! Her books allowed me to help in the creation of so many joy-filled young readers. –
From Joseph Gulla, General Manager, Alazar Press – We are so fortunate to have published three books with Eloise in the last few years. My most powerful memories of working with Eloise were when we put together The Women Who Caught the Babies in 2018. A lot of the work involved laying out the book matching art from Daniel Minter with the poems in just the right way. We were especially challenged to find photos of Black midwives to align with Eloise’s text at the beginning of the book. The All My Babies teaching movie from George C. Stoney gave us frame shots to get the moments right matching the story with images.
One cold Sunday in December, I drove from North Carolina to Washington DC to visit Eloise. The idea was to record the poems and make them part of the book using a QRC on the book linking to the voice files. I knocked at the door with my computer and microphone in hand and Eloise was ready for me. Her eyesight was poor, so she had very large print versions of the poems. We recorded them in about an hour. We had just a couple of retakes and I was ready to return to North Carolina. I took a photo of her holding her recent lifetime achievement award and went out the door and returned home. I was in awe of her and feel so fortunate that I had the chance to visit her and make the recordings.
