In her poem “Ordinary Offering” published in 2020 in the South Florida Poetry Journal, Coconut Grove writer Catherine Esposito Prescott describes her pregnancies this way:
It’s the most beautiful thing we do, she said
which meant carrying a spirit within our bodies,
which could also mean being possessed
by another. When pregnant with my daughter,
I craved chocolate and sex; with one son it was salted
meats and conversation, with the other son, milkshakes
and classical music. Each time their spirit left me
like a fierce wind, blowing the sail of my body
inside and out. …
“Poetry,” Prescott says. “It’s to make sense of the things that don’t make sense.”
Like Miami, perhaps.
Originally from New York, Prescott moved to South Beach in 2001, and to Coconut Grove in 2021. In between, the mother of three founded SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) with fellow poet Jen Karetnick, a friend and colleague.
Prescott serves as editor in chief of the organization, which supports women writers through the online poetry journal SWWIM Every Day (which publishes a poem a day, shared by email with more than 2,000 subscribers) and a reading series at The Betsy hotel in South Beach.
Prescott was first introduced to poetry – almost by chance – through a creative writing class at Walt Whitman High School on Long Island.
She recalls signing up for an audio-visual journalism class instead, but her guidance counselor thought creative writing was a better fit. “He was right,” she says.
She fell in love with poetry. Today, she’s the author of “Accidental Garden” (Gunpowder Press 2023), which won the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize, and the chapbooks “Maria Sings” and “The Living Ruin” (chapbooks are small books or poetry or other writing).
Another Miami writer, Ana Menendez, describes Prescott’s poetry as “searing and sublime.”
“Whether writing of an ordinary sea-side lunch or devastating loss, Catherine Esposito Prescott honors the wild, boundless heart of motherhood with precision and love,” Menendez said in a blurb for “The Living Ruin,” published in 2013.
More recently, Prescott experienced the loss of one of her children.
Prescott’s son Austen was diagnosed in 2022 with a rare pediatric brain cancer. He passed away in August 2023. Prescott wrote a series of poems based on the year of her son’s illness and death.
“Some poems are technically difficult,” she says. “Others are emotionally difficult.”
In addition to writing poetry, Prescott has worked as a copywriter, bookseller, event organizer, professor, and yoga instructor.
Prescott says she was motivated to start SWWIM with Karetnick to give women a place to express their perspectives in a literary landscape that has often favored men.
Mary Block, a senior editor and director of development at SWWIM, admires that impulse. “Instead of accepting that they weren’t going to be included in what already existed,” Block says, “they created their own.”
Prescott envisions a future where SWWIM continues to evolve organically, guided by its mission and the creative energy of its community.
“It gives us language for things that we have no language for,” she said.
FIU students Nayeli Membreno & Andrea Rivera wrote this story as part of a cooperative agreement between FIU’s Lee Caplin School of Journalism & Media and the Spotlight.
