About Corn Likker & Daffodils

Eve Hoffman demonstrates the best of what it means to be a storyteller: Her poetry both touches the heart and challenges us. Her words conjure worlds into which we’re invited to enter, explore, and immerse. Just as in every good story, in each poem, we are not mere bystander, but witness and accomplice, living the story along with her. Audrey Galex, television producer, storyteller, author Turtle Rocks


A premier collection of the Southern experience with all its contradictions, all its pain and its beauty. Daffodils, a touchtone, provide a bright spot intermixed with the darker themes of insurrection, pandemic, uncertainty, changing roles, wrestling with the past and loss in a vibrant present.

Cheryl Ann Passanisi, nurse practitioner, singer, poet, author Geraniums from the Little Sophias of Unruly Wisdom

About Memory & Complicity

Eve Hoffman confronts our moral sensibilities. Being a white, Jewish girl (and then woman) of privilege in the South over the last half century was fraught with contradictions and challenge. Eve reveals not being taught of the 1906 Atlanta race riot, or of her great-grandmother’s involvement in the Georgia Women’s Suffrage movement. She recalls black field hands not being invited to sit at a common table, and of learning the startling truth that lynchings were not the furtive acts of rednecks but public displays of racial power where tickets were sometimes sold. She shares the experience of living on a farm where cows were shot and hung by their legs to be butchered. In her honest, unembellished way, Eve’s unsettling glimpses of her own past are a moral challenge to our own willful ignorances and the difficult truths of our own life history.

Paul Wolpe, Emory University

About Celebration of Healing

Back down the hill to the Marriott for my friends’ Eve Hoffman and Sal Brownfield’s presentation of their book of art and essay, “A Celebration of Healing.” Sal is a painter and Eve, a poet. Sal began a project of painting breast cancer survivors which culminated in twenty-one large canvasses that are more like stained glass windows. They are luminous and what they illuminate is courage, damage and the will to live on. Eve’s poetic essays give us the stories behind the paintings. Two of Sal’s paintings framed them as they talked and read. These images and stories were intended to move us to deeper empathy and they did. I dried my eyes and walked back up the hill. Franklin Abbott, poet and psychologist

While I was waiting for my wife to have a biopsy, the Celebration of Healing painting and story in the waiting room of the university cancer center wasn’t just art, but an expression of life, of hope, of encouragement for a novice spouse in the world of breast cancer clinic visits. David Schechter, CNN Senior National Editor

Although the Celebration of Healing paintings are about women and breast cancer – fear thereof, survival therefrom, living with, triumphing over – they are more about the beauty of human life. Artists through time have used the human body, especially the female body, to celebrate creation. Not many (none that I can think of with the possible exception of Goya) have used illness and even disfigurement in the service of beauty. Celebration is one of the most powerful platforms for education about breast cancer that I have encountered, dramatically encouraging prevention and resoundingly affirming the fullness of life attainable after cancer, including after cancer surgery.

Paula Lawton Bevington, First Woman President, Rotary Club of Atlanta; Past Chair, Georgia Human Relations Commission

About SHE

SHE, a quintet of wind-swept poems is a compact memoir tracing the steps of a diffident child as she becomes a confident woman who simultaneously follows the rules and pushes the boundaries. She chooses a man who deals in the “uncommon currencies” of bear hugs and laughter, recalls the rumbly-tumbly of her now adult children, shoulders an array of civic duties, accepts—bewildered—widowhood. Love comes again, almost stealthily, then rooted like the trees, she celebrates. The fifth poem, a prayer, leads the reader toward the future, acknowledging fear and affirming joy. Lucky reader. Paula Bevington, Attorney, civic and business leader, Atlanta.

About Red Clay


Eve Hoffman’s is a well-seasoned voice, a storyteller’s voice, the voice of a woman whose girlhood in the south – dirt roads and damp sheets on clotheslines; bombed synagogues and segregation and the Ku Klux Klan – is evoked here, along with her seasons as daughter and mother and wife and widow, in loving detail, in rich remembrance. Cecilia Woloch, poet


An authentic Southern voice with a universal chord, Eve Hoffman’s poetry continues down that remarkable path of great Southern writers before her. In Red Clay she tells of children, parents, a husband, school, tragedy, friendship, war and love. Set against a background of sky and earth, her poetry testifies to the enduring power and appeal of place.  Jamil Zainaldin, President, Georgia Humanities Council