Emma Cottrell is a free-lance writer and poet now living in Atlanta, Georgia who seeks to explore the inner nature of things and the role of the senses in her writings. Her poetry has been published in two anthologies, Twilight Musings and A Surrender to the Moon and in journals such as Georgia Backroads and White Tops. She is in the midst of writing a manuscript of the first gold-rush in America in the mountains of Georgia and developing one of her short-stories, Viola Templeton, into a screen play.
A native South Carolinian, she received her B.A. in Art History and M.L.S in Library Science from the University of South Carolina. During her career, she held posts at the Undergraduate Library at USC and Midlands Technical College. She served in the Peace Corps, Education Division, organizing library services at the Union Station Agricultural College and Windward Island Research Association at St. Lucia, West Indies. Returning to South Carolina, she was Director of Library Services for Clarendon County for five years before accepting the challenge to establish state-of-the-art electronic libraries at Chattahoochee Technical College near Atlanta. She served as Director of the Libraries there until retirement in 1998.
She enjoys writing in prose in all its forms but it is the pursuit of poetry that is her first love: the unending search to find the words that produce sounds and rhythms of everyday life, allowing the reader to reflect, to soar, to identify, to react. As a member of the Pickneyville Writers’ Group, The Poetry Society of American, and the Georgia Poetry Society, she continues in her search for words that will best dramatize meaning, thrust, and the force of life in her writings.