About – Wendy Marie Vergoz

Wendy Marie Vergoz is the author of the poetry book The Unbinding (Wipf and Stock 2019). She has won awards in both the United States and France. Her most recent publication, an essay written in French, appears in a collection of essays which won Aix-Marseille University’s Prix Écriture et création.

Vergoz has received grants from the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the Indiana Arts Commission, and Indiana Campus Compact. She was one of four featured poets featured on WFYI radio’s No Limits in honor of National Poetry Month. Her poems have been published in Pink Panther Magazine, Panoply, Cleaver Magazine, The Christian Century, Flying Island, and Anglican Theological Review, and they have appeared in exhibitions at the Arthur M. Glick JCC, the Indianapolis Artsgarden, the Harrison Center for the Arts, Gallery 308 and other venues.

For four years Vergoz directed a writing workshop for women survivors of incarceration, domestic violence, and drug addiction in the Mapleton-Fall Creek Community of Indianapolis. She edited two books of writing by the workshop’s participants. This work changed her forever for the better.

Vergoz’s current book project focuses on her French ancestors who lived on Île de France (Mauritius) and la Réunion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores the strong sense of identity she feels as a French descendent, something in deep conflict with the fact that her ancestors were involved in the slave trade.

Research and Creative Interests

Poetry/Essays/Creative Writing
Social Justice and Activism—feminism, gender studies, domestic violence, Black Lives Matter
French Colonialism—especially Île de France (Mauritius) and la Réunion, the East African Slave Trade and Slavery on Île de France and Réunion
Collective Memory
Writing as Recovery
Creative Arts—especially connections between writing and visual art

“Wendy Vergoz’s poetry is an important and compelling eyewitness to the trauma of abuse. Breaking silence and shame, Vergoz gives powerful voice to the bound and wounded soul that discovers its ultimate unbinding and healing. This is a critical collection that deserves a wide audience.”

“The Unbinding is a beautifully controlled cycle of poems depicting the abuse of a woman and its effects by a clergyman husband. Powerful, moving, and liberating for both poet and reader, it will inspire other women to tell their stories and enlighten men. The title sequence, in which the author communes as victim with Isaac, son of Abraham, is a brilliant gem that transforms her into a survivor whose truth-telling opens the way to healing.”

“Vergoz’s poetry sings with grief and rage. It vividly shows the desecration caused by rape and domestic violence and speaks truth with absolute courage. This healing testimony links personal to political, and inner to outer world. Here is both the story of one woman’s determined journey toward healing and a starkly honest narrative of cultural violence affecting all women’s lives.”

“Even though the poetic style is quite different, I am reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Terrible Sonnets,’ filled with angst and doubt and the torture of God’s silence. Wendy Vergoz rehearses these themes, which are as old as poetry itself, but she asks the questions in a new context, startling, disturbing, anchored in the fallen world but simultaneously reaching toward a particularly elusive deus absconditus.”

“Wendy Vergoz’s The Unbinding captures the loneliness and isolation, the rage and confusion of an abusive marriage in vivid, disquieting imagery that at times piles up and contradicts and interrupts itself, as if the words themselves are trying to understand what happened to her. Yet, throughout, she finds a blessed thread of grace in small moments with her children and in the natural world. The urgency, rawness, courage, and luminosity in Vergoz’s story of abuse are great and necessary gifts, not only to those who have experienced it, but to those of us who love them and want to support them in reclaiming their lives.”