Annie Reiner on Poets Cafe

The following interview of Annie Reiner by Lois P. Jones originally aired on KPFK Los Angeles  on October 19th, 2009 (reproduced with permission and thanks to producer Marlena Bond).

Biographical Information—Annie Reiner

Annie Reiner is a poet, playwright, artist, and psychoanalyst who has won awards for poetry, short stories and children’s stories. Her most recent book of poems is entitled Presents of Mind (2008, Red Dancefloor Press). Her other poetry collections are Mind Your Head (1990), The Naked I (1994), and Beyond Rhyme & Reason (2002). She wrote a book of short stories called This Nervous Breakdown is Driving Me Crazy (1996), and she has written and illustrated four children’s books. One of Reiner’s children’s stories, “Dancing In The Park,” was narrated on audiotape by Sharon Stone and won the Parent’s Choice Golden Award for Best Children’s Audio of 1996.

Reiner has had three one-woman shows of her paintings.  Her last, in Los Angeles (1999), was described in Art Week as “Tense, yet languid, vague yet precise,  Reiner’s works capture the complexities of the contemporary condition through the metaphors of visual paradox.”

Throughout the varied disciplines in which she works, Reiner’s abiding interest in the essential qualities of the human mind and spirit provide a unifying thread, so that each medium deepens and nourishes the other.   She maintains a private practice in Beverly Hills and her work with dreams is documented in many articles in psychoanalytic journals and anthologies. Her new psychoanalytic exploration of conscience entitled, The Quest For Conscience & The Birth Of The Mind (2009, Karnac Press), was recently published and is available from Amazon.