POETRY IN MOTION

No wonder poet/essayist Laura Joyce- Hubbard, who flew unarmed U.S. Air Force C-130s carrying relief cargo during the Bosnia War in the mid-1990s, is the City of Highland Park’s first Poet Laureate.

Even snippets of passages in her essays could pass for stirring stanzas.

To wit: “Rich jade mountains unrolled beneath our flight path,” she writes at the beginning of her “Flying Superman into Sarajevo” piece. “In my periphery, the mountaintops emerged out of mist, the scooped terrain like high-backed horse saddles.”

Joyce-Hubbard applied for the two-year poet laureate post in late 2022, and started serving in 2023. Highland Park’s Cultural Arts Advisory Group (CAAG) had created the title under then-chair Judith Kaufman. On July 4, 2023—exactly a year after the Highland Park parade shooting claimed seven lives and wounded 48 others—Joyce- Hubbard recited a poem she had crafted for community members who gathered for a memorial ceremony in downtown Highland Park.

She’ll seek to help attendees, and others, heal through her poetry again on July 4 this year.

“In my experience, grief can be so lonely,” says Joyce-Hubbard, who has lived in Highland Park for 16 years and has been married to former U.S. Air Force pilot and current commercial pilot Lloyd Hubbard for 28 years. “Whether families or survivors hear my poem on July 4 or not, I believe there is value, as community members, in trying to be part of the support net that says, ‘I remember your beloved with you. And I am here, too.’

“It is especially important to show up as years go by,” she continues. “There tends to be a lot of outpouring in the immediacy. I hope to be a part of the community that weaves a net, not only of love, but of enduring grief ’s ‘lonely corridors’ together.”

Her tenure as poet laureate was supposed to end this year. CAAG asked her to serve for a third year, as the appointee “to enliven Highland Park’s literary arts,” and she agreed to do so.

Joyce-Hubbard grew up as the oldest of four siblings on a wooden boat in Delray Beach, Florida, from the age of 3 until the age of 11 or 12. Her mother, Trish Joyce, is in her 50th year teaching English and Creative Writing at Broward College in Florida; her father, Noel Smith, retired after 30 years of teaching Economics at Palm Beach State College in Boca Raton, Florida.

Laureate Laura’s stepmother is Linda Smith, who has been a keen supporter of Laura’s career evolution from pilot to photographer to poet.

“My mother was all about writing, creativity, and poetry when I was young and growing up on campuses in Florida,” Joyce-Hubbard recalls. “She’d write a poem for practically every family event, from birthdays to graduation parties, and then she’d read them to us. Our mother would never be able to read a poem without crying. It reached the point where her kids had to take care of the poetry writing on those occasions.”

Shy in high school, Joyce-Hubbard became a cheerleader “to appear that I was extroverted,” she says. In the summer before her freshman year at Pope John Paul II High School in East Boca Raton, she and her best friend showed up together at a cheerleading camp and wondered why the other campers arrived in groups of 20.

“We ended up having to lather ourselves in Ben-Gay,” a chuckling Joyce-Hubbard says.

After majoring in political science, competing for the fencing team, and becoming a Second Lieutenant at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Joyce-Hubbard emerged in the first generation of women to pilot the C-130 Hercules.

In November 2001, two months after the 9/11 attacks, Joyce-Hubbard, then a commercial pilot at American Airlines, helped organize memorial events for families of the airline crews. One memorial honored the flight crews of the American and United Airlines by running a flag to symbolically complete the intended flight routes from Boston and New York, through Washington D.C., to Los Angeles.

“I was struck by the net of love that seemed to be sustaining the families,” says Joyce-Hubbard, who also worked at the Pentagon in the Office of the Environment before retiring from military service in 2010. “I also remember seeing the well-lived hands of a 9/11 pilot’s parents clasping.”

Laura and Lloyd have two children, Liam, 21, and Teagan, 18.

Their mother is about halfway to completing her Master of Fine Arts degree at Northwestern University.

“My professors are amazing,” Joyce-Hubbard says. “I’m learning about the technical side of writing. One of my poetry professors at Northwestern is (two-term United States Poet Laureate and 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry winner) Natasha Trethewey, who has been incredibly helpful and an instrumental mentor in my role as Highland Park Poet Laureate. I’m so fortunate to have been her student and can’t imagine doing this role without her inspiration.”

Trethewey recently visited Highland Park for a public conversation with Joyce-Hubbard. Trethewey’s words were a point of inspiration for Joyce-Hubbard’s poem to the community this July 4. Trethewey said, “I’m often asked: ‘How do you go into the space where you have to remember and reflect?’ The poem is the care. Even the most horrendous things can be transformed in the language of the poem. I am my happiest in the act of making a poem. Because that is a hopeful act.”

“I hope,” Joyce-Hubbard adds, “what translates in my poem is how deeply I care.”

Highland Park’s first poet laureate has also delivered moving words to audiences at Memorial Day and Veterans Day events. She also holds a workshop on poetry writing and oversees a Favorite Poem Project at the Highland Park Public Library.

The latter duty was so well-received that Joyce-Hubbard plans to conduct the project four times a year instead of only once, rotating locations throughout the city.

She won The Iowa Review’s Veterans’ Writing Contest in 2022, and received a 2020 Janecek Fellowship from Lake Forest-based Ragdale Foundation. Also in 2020, Joyce-Hubbard earned a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to attend the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) and won the Individual Poem and the Essay Prize in the William Faulkner Pirates’ Alley Writing Competition.

Want more Laura Joyce-Hubbard prose?

Thought so.

“Waiting for a letter to arrive, writing a reply, and licking an envelope required patience,” she writes of exchanging handwritten letters with her future husband. “A romance on slow burn felt somehow like a perfect antidote to the speed of movement in our respective cockpits and the corresponding speed of the thinking required for the job.”

To read some of Laura Joyce-Hubbard’s works, visit laurajoycehubbard.com.