After stints in staff positions at a couple of daily newspapers, Ranney Campbell became a freelancer, including spot news reporting for Reuters International News Agency and a decade as the St. Louis County election night stringer for the Associated Press, but in late 2015, a stranger on the street assaulted her with a hammer as she walked in her neighborhood in South St. Louis, resulting in a nearly life-ending brain injury. Nine months after the attack, Campbell began a creative writing MFA at UM-St. Louis, weighted heavily in theory, and finished frantically. She then sold her house for cash to the pleasantly-surprised developers working next door for half of its appraised value and nearly reached the Texas border on her way to California before her own graduate reading-which, clearly, she skipped-was over. She since has worked in warehouses on-and-off and authored the poetry chapbooks, "Pimp," "Charcoal and Ink," (Arroyo Seco Press) and "the desert so," (Bottlecap Press) and, more recently, has regained some of her ability to write prose, the product of which has been published by Twelve Winters, Star 82 Review, Reed Magazine and elsewhere. At the time of this writing, she still is breathing, and still in California, where she steadfastly practices a twice daily meditation routine and a newly acquired refusal to be made use of.