Lauren Zuniga has been performing poetry for nearly 10 years. She attended her first National Poetry Slam in 2000 and came home sprung. Hungry for more life. She went off and got married, made beautiful babies, bought lamps and drapes and wrote poems about doing dishes. Then one day she realized she had forgotten all about a certain part of herself. She wanted to be on stage, display her insides, let judges assign a numerical value to them. So, she started going to poetry slams again.

She was on the 2007 and 2008 Oklahoma City slam teams.  She is the 2009 Tulsa Living Arts Slam Champion. She was a top twenty finisher at the 2009 Women of the World Poetry Slam. She has performed in churches and schools as well as highly esteemed poetry venues such as The Green Mill Lounge in Chicago, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York and The Mercury Cafe in Denver.  She has been featured on the Marianne Williamson show on the Oprah and Friends Network (XM radio) She has recently been published in the Lamplighter Review, The Faulking Truth and the Write Bloody Anthology, “The Good Things About America.”  Her work spans the gritty and splendid, integrating politics, spirituality and humanity through her love for vivid language and imagery.

Zuniga has been studying meditation and spirituality for 12 years.  She is the co-founder of The Shift Collective, a network of artivists making shift happen, through which she facilitates [Shift]Write, a workshop that combines meditation exercises with writing exercises for highly aware writing. She is also the founder of the Oklahoma Young Writers Collective, and organization committed to providing more opportunities and support for young writers.

Review of The Nickel Tour by Cristin O'keefe Aptowicz

“In her debut book, ‘The Nickel Tour,’ poet Lauren Zuniga provides a startlingly honest look in a life at the crossroads.

The book begins with the ending of her seven year marriage to the father of her two children. I've known other poets in the same position to use their poetry to prop up their own argument for the end, rallying readers to support the them and sometimes just flat out ranting and demeaning their ex-partner in the service of burning down their relationship so that the poet can rise like a phoenix from the ashes.

With her poetry, however, Zuniga walks through every darkened room of her relationship almost without judgment, and flips on the lights to really examine what really happened. It is thoughtful and utterly human poetry. She understands the role she has played herself in the demise of the relationship, as evidenced by "Things To Do In An Ice Storm," the first poem of this first section where she writes: "Hold your body out for stranded passengers. / Live in laundry baskets. / Weave baskets out of past conversations / You'll need a loom as sturdy as every lie / and thread as slick as every promise."

The book continues with this same clear-eyed honesty, as she learns to live without a partner and the loneliness and frustration that brings; as she attempts to balance being a passionate & sexual woman with a being a single mother who sometimes doesn't want to be the only washing the dishes; as a being an American who should be more tuned into the larger changes impacting her community / society with being the type of person who truly believes the best way she can change the world is being raising strong & smart children.

The purely political poems which end the collection don't work as a well for me as the incredibly strong and intensely personal poems from the earlier sections, but it's a minor criticism if you consider how much this poet was willing to expose herself -- her true self -- in this collection.

This is another fantastic collection from Penmanship Books, who has really eked out its position in the independent press market by showcasing the page work some of the U.S. poetry slam movement's better known stage poets. Together with Write Bloody Publishing, I think Penmanship Books is finally showing the publishing industry how to really showcasing the amazing work being down in American spoken word today. I'm looking forward to reading / hearing more from Zuniga and from Penmanship Books as well.”

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