In Spring of 2015, dancing girl press will publish my chapbook Imaginary Kansas. This project has gone through many iterations, and I’m so glad that it has found a home with dancing girl. I’m a big admirer of dgp and editor Kristy Bowen, and I’m honored to be among the catalog of dancing girl authors.
Imaginary Kansas is a project that fragments and queers longing. It ruminates on heteronormativity and desire. Imaginary Kansas existed as an artist’s book object in an edition of one in the Call and Response exhibit Parallel Lives during the 2013 Fall for the Book festival. I’m excited to see its next life.
In the month of November, my friend and colleague Nicole Tong curated a series of interviews with writers at Les Femmes Folles: Women in Art and she was kind of enough to include me. LFF is a curated spotlight on women (ish in my case) artists in any media. Les Femmes Folles is run by Sally Brown Deskins, an artist I greatly admire, informed and inspired by Wanda Ewing.
Nicole’s series included myself, essayist and short fiction writer Kirsten Clodfelter, travel writer Amy Gigi Alexander, and poet Allison Wilkins.
Nicole and Sally were also kind enough to reprint one of my cable shopping poems, which Stirring: A Literary Collection has nominated for a Pushcart. You can read my interview here, in which I discuss gender and Gazing Grain Press and national parks and cable shopping poems and breaking systems down and:
I will be taking part in the Poets Tent at this weekend’s Court House Arts & Craft Beer Festival. The festival features beer, of course, and also musicians, food trucks, arts, and poets! The Poets Tent is curated & hosted by Meg Ronan and Dan Gutstein; the twenty-ish featured poets and writers will be active from 1 pm to 6 pm. Check out the poets here and the festival features here. The festival takes place on Sunday, October 12th from noon to 7 pm at the municipal parking at the top of the Arlington Courthouse Metro. This will be a fun time!
There’s a lot of ick in the literary world this week. Meanwhile, in feminist utopia, this beautiful 15th Anniversary Issue of Stirring: A Literary Collection has been released. This is Erin Elizabeth Smith’s last issue as managing editor of the journal; she will still be managing editor of Sundress Publications. You should read Erin’s incredible letter welcoming the new managing editors and tracing the last 15 years of Sundress Publications and Stirring and early online lit journals and feminist publishing and and and.
This issue includes the debut of my home shopping channel poems! I’m pretty stoked about that, as I’ve been working hard to place these quirky collages.
I’m so glad to share space with such good poets and friends: poets Allie Marini Batts, Jennifer Jackson Berry, Ruth Foley, Fox Frazier-Foley, Amorak Huey, Jill Khoury, Kristin LaTour, Sandy Marchetti, T.A. Noonan, Staci R. Schoenfeld, fiction-writer Jennifer A. Howard, cover artist Stephanie Phillips, plus a review of Samantha Duncan’s One Never Eats Four by Sara Biggs Chaney.
I’m incredibly excited that my chapbook Traveling survived Thunderdome and emerged as one of five (!) winning titles. Margaret and Tess at Hyacinth Girl are wonderful to work with, and I’m so grateful to be publishing a project with a press that identifies as feminist and that encourages work from writers of all genders.
Traveling will be part of the 2015 series, along with books by Thunderdomers Neil Aitken, Jenn Blair, T.A. Noonan, Kimberly Ann Southwick, and by Pamela Taylor.
Traveling is a book that grew out of a book. I recombined the prose sequences from my full-length manuscript Theater of Parts and started sending them out as Traveling last year. The manuscript came in as a finalist and semi-finalist a few times, and I am so happy that it has found a home. I’m also really excited that my first larger publication comes from my first book. More and more, I hear of poets publishing other projects before the book they wrote first. This work represents me well, I think. I couldn’t be happier.