I am a heart-centered teacher, poet, and tarot muse passionate about inspiring others to engage in cross-pollination and hybrid forms from poetry movies to tarot haiku.

As a cross-pollinator and lover of hybrid forms, I first became attracted to the Tarot in my early twenties. I love to study the pictorial representations of life’s gifts and challenges depicted in the Tarot decks of history and especially of our times.

While poetry is my first love, tarot journaling remains a close second, a practice that evolved over the 30 years I’ve engaged with the tarot. Writing daily using a tarot card as a journaling prompt lead to an even more satisfying practice of creating personal tarot cards featuring personal symbols. I started to make my own deck alongside my students in 2016, artwork that you’ll find in Heart’s Compass Tarot: Discover Tarot Journaling and Create Your Own Cards (Two Fine Crows Books, 2021). While creating my personal Ace of Swords, I chose to focus on adversity, choosing the Windmill instead of the Sword to represent the gift of the mind.

The Ace of Windmills represents the willingness to use the winds of adversity to power positive creative projects and personal growth which is a guiding focus for my own writing and the way I approach teaching. I love witnessing other writers, artists, and seekers find confidence in their voices and arrive at a deeper sense of self-love and awareness with which to shape their lives.

Tania’s credentials

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tania is the author of the full-length poetry collection, November Butterfly (Saddle Road Press, 2014), and the tarot workbook, Heart’s Compass Tarot: Discover Tarot Journaling and Create Your Own Cards (Two Fine Crows Books, 2021). Tania’s memoir-in-poems, The Fool in the Corn, is forthcoming from Saddle Road Press in 2022. She lives in Coronado with her husband, three children, one blue-eyed Siberian Husky and a formerly feral feline named Luna.

Tania’s journey to her credentials:

I can’t ever remember not writing! Whether living in Illinois, Northern California, Denmark, Iowa, or Southern California, writing remained a steady catalyzing force that lead to study at UC Davis, The University of Iowa, and sharing and teaching opportunities in landscapes from the heartland to the desert to the city of Copenhagen and more.

In 2011, I began to attend A Room of Her Own Foundation retreats where I presented, consulted and taught; most recently in 2015, I was honored to attend as a recipient of the Marg Chandler Memorial Fellowship. I was formerly the poetry editor for the Fertile Source and a co-founding blogger for Mother Writer Mentor, sites that supported mothers on their path to realizing their potential as writers.

My collaborative micro movies feature poetry paired with the photography of Robyn Beattie and the music of my father Stephen Pryputniewicz; She Dressed in a Hurry (for Lady Diana), Amelia, and Nefertiti Among Us were awarded Juror’s Best of Show at the 2012 2D/3D visual poetry show held at the LH Horton Jr Gallery at San Joaquin Delta College.

Recent poems from The Fool in the Corn (forthcmoming from Two Fine Crows Books) appeared in Chiron Review, Nimrod International, Prime Number Magazine, Silver Birch Press, Journal of Applied Poetics, Juked, and Whale Road Review.

After teaching in the English Department at the Santa Rosa Junior College for several years, I moved with my husband and three children from the Russian River in Northern California to San Diego in 2012. I quickly fell in love with the writing community, teaching poetry and tarot journaling for San Diego Writers, Ink since 2014 and writing courses through Antioch University’s Center for Continuing Education since the spring of 2020 (recent course Tarot as Inner Teacher series uses Court Cards to explore ancestry). I live in Coronado, California with my family, which includes our blue-eyed Siberian Husky and one formerly feral but extremely committed-to-keyboard-blocking-housecat named Luna.