A Colorado Springs Gazette.com article recently caught my attention. It was about Jane Hilberry, an English professor at Colorado College, who had been invited to speak to middle school children in the Springs. When leaders at the school discovered Hilberry’s Body Painting book, they rescinded her invitation. According to the article, the book “features nudity on its cover and verse about … same-sex attraction” (Rabey 2009). A University of Northern Colorado website states, “Crazy Jane … makes appearances throughout Hilberry’s work, seducing a bear, sleeping in a priest’s bed, and generally transgressing social norms.

Ultimately, the poet celebrates unconventional choices—to love both men and women, not to have children, and to abandon the attempt to find God in church” (Colorado Poets Center). Hilberry responded to the rescindment of her invitation by saying that she feels “deeply, deeply, deeply that art has in some ways saved [her] life...click here, to open the entire article, in Adobe Reader format.