Wisconsin Poet Kathie Giorgio Turns Grief into Action

WAUKESHA, Wis. - Rezul -- When author and poet Kathie Giorgio heard the phone message telling her that her husband, Michael Giorgio, had been struck by a vehicle and was in the hospital in critical condition, she could not imagine the ways her life and Michael's were about to change. Michael suffered with devastating injuries for five months, ultimately succumbing to those injuries, passing away on June 14, 2024. It was just shy of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Instead of preparing for their anniversary cruise, Kathie suddenly became a widow.

Now Giorgio is sharing what those five months and the following year were like in her new poetry collection, The Birth of a Widow, released in March by Kelsay Books.

Raw with grief, Kathie headed to Oregon coast for her previously scheduled annual writing retreat just 66 days after Michael's death. With no plan to sit down and write about his death or the events surrounding it, Kathie found that once there, she suddenly "burst out into poetry" about what had happened. Instead of fighting it, she allowed the poems to come. Giorgio gave herself permission to write whatever arose for one year. The new collection, Birth of a Widow, is the result of that year of allowing.

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"This one is bittersweet," says Giorgio. "These poems became the book I never intended to write." However, as this collection has gone out into the world, Giorgio has been moved by the response from other women who have had to navigate their own losses.

Writing has been so important to Giorgio as she processes her grief, that to mark the book's release, she wanted a two-part launch event. The first part was a writing workshop "Finding the Words: Writing About Grief" held at AllWriters' Workplace & Workshop on Saturday, May 2.  Later that same day at Books & Company in Oconomowoc, Kathie read from the collection to a packed house and was then joined in conversation with Waukesha traumatic grief counselor Marcia Williams.

Giorgio will join Milwaukee's Vision Zero Summit on Wednesday, June 10 at the Milwaukee Central Library's Centennial Hall, reading from the collection at the event convocation. At the after hours event, she will join fellow authors Anna Zivarts and Jonathan Stalls on a discussion panel. As a result of what happened to Michael, Kathie has become a vocal advocate for Wisconsin's Vision Zero initiatives. Vision Zero is a worldwide initiative seeking to eliminate pedestrian deaths by 2035. Currently, Milwaukee and Madison are among the more than 60 cities in the US participating.

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To learn more Milwaukee's Vision Zero efforts and the upcoming summit, please visit https://city.milwaukee.gov/VisionZero.

For a full listing of Kathie Giorgio's upcoming events, please see kathiegiorgio.org