On Wednesday, Feb. 4 the Coffee Cup Bunch of the Friends of the Library will begin its 2009 season with readings from “Lessons From an Oklahoma Girlhoo”d given by the poet herself, Dorothy Alexander from Cheyenne.

Alexander is a poet, publisher and storyteller, born into a farming and ranching family in western Oklahoma. She was reared in Roger Mills County where she and her family still live. She is co-owner of Village Books Press in Cheyenne, a two-woman publishing house, which publishes the work of Oklahoma writers.

She has published four collections of her own poetry: “The Dust Bowl Revisited,” “Borrowed Dust,” “Rough Drafts” and her latest book, “Lessons From and Oklahoma Girlhood,” which includes photographs of artwork created by nineteen Oklahoma women artists in response to Alexander’s poetry. She also writes non-fiction stories and essays, and has edited two collections of oral history of her home community.

To describe her work, Alexander said, “I have wanted to tell stories and poems about Oklahomans, especially people in rural Western Oklahoma, from the first time I read the poems of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel.

She left Oklahoma as a teenager in the 1930’s Dust Bowl exodus to California, and her poetry chronicles the lives of the Okies who have lived in the great central valley of California since the 1930’s. Like her, I consider myself to be a ‘true Okie,’ but I wanted to write about the Okies who stayed in Oklahoma and survived in spite of the dust, drought, and debt of those years and all the ones since.”

Prior to her retirement as an attorney, Alexander practiced law in western Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle for more than thirty-five years. She still serves as municipal judge for the towns of Sayre and Erick in Beckham County.

The Coffee Cup Bunch meets at the Altus Public Library on the first Wednesday of every month. The meetings are free and open to the public.