Bridget Kriner is a community college professor in Cleveland, Ohio, where she teaches English and Women’s & Gender Studies. Her work has appeared in The Shore, Variant Literary, New Delta Review, Rattle Poets Respond, and Split this Rock, where she won First Place in the Abortion Rights Poetry Contest. Over the last several years, she has participated in the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Kenyon Review Summer Residential Workshop. She is a supporting editor at Trio House Press and a reader at Chestnut Review and Only Poems! Over the course of her working life, she has worked as a barista, bartender, abortion clinic patient advocate, union organizer, and fair housing tester.

A little over a year ago, Trio House editors Kris and Natasha offered me the chance to work on Emily Hyland’s forthcoming collection, My Wise Little Ghost, as a secondary editor. If I am being completely honest, I was equally thrilled and terrified about this opportunity. Sure—I was a tenured writing professor with 15 years of experience teaching composition and creative writing, and had served as the Poetry Editor for the student literary magazine in grad school. Still, editing a poetry collection was something new, and I wasn’t so sure I knew enough or was poet enough to handle this level of responsibility (probably on account of a chronic, intractable case of imposter syndrome, but that is another story, far beyond the scope of this reflection). As is often the case, my self-doubts were concealing all of the possibilities inherent to this opportunity–namely, everything I could learn. What follows are a few of my reflections on what it meant to be a part of bringing a fellow poet’s book into the world and what I have learned (so far).

A poetry collection is more car than wheel

In other words, a poetry collection is a whole thing on its own, not just an accumulation of individual poems. This distinction is one that I don’t think I ever truly understood until I worked with Natasha and Emily on this first collection. While I had read a great many poetry collections, I can say now that I didn’t fully understand the difference. What finally clicked for me is that a poetry collection is a singular entity unto itself that is intended to be read as a cohesive whole. A single poem, too, is a whole thing unto itself—its own little universe of meaning and discovery. However, when this one single little universe becomes part of a poetry collection, it is transformed. It is no longer on its own, it is part of a team. It becomes a part of something completely new. It’s that completely new entity that I had to understand with more clarity as a poetry editor—I had to take a step back until I could see how all the poems were functioning together.

In the car-wheel analogy, a poetry collection is like a car—a complex mechanism in which many different parts work together to make the car go somewhere. As such, the individual poems are the car’s individual components—wheels, engine, carburetor. A reader is the car’s driver. Just as the driver of an actual car can drive it without necessarily having a complete understanding of what is under the hood, a reader can maneuver through any book just fine without knowing exactly how to write one.

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A poetry editor is a reader

A poetry editor is first and foremost a reader—but importantly, a poetry editor is a reader who reads both the lines of the poems and what lies between them (and also what is between the poems themselves, between the sections, and between the first poem and the last one). I learned that instead of looking closely at each single poem for what it did and what it might offer a reader, I had to pay close attention to these other less visible spaces in the collection.

To offer another analogy—a poetry collection is like a completed jigsaw puzzle, while the poems inside are the puzzle pieces. Here, what a poetry editor considers are the junctures where the pieces join and the ways the shapes and lines form the puzzle’s structure. Everything must fit together. It is worth noting that unlike a jigsaw puzzle, a poetry collection could be assembled successfully in many different ways. But there lies another observation I made about the job of an editor—to consider the way the poet assembled their poems, how that particular organization (as opposed to another possible sequencing) is working, and what a reader might take away.

Being a poetry editor is a human interaction

Perhaps this thought would have been less salient to me a few years ago—back before LLMs figured so largely into writerly questions about process and authorship. But given that this is where we are, it feels important to emphasize—working as a poetry collection editor is not a job, it’s a relationship between humans. And all the conventions of human-to-human relationships apply—e.g., listen more than you talk. Listen to the poems very closely—what are they saying or trying to say? Listen to the poet—what do they hope a reader will see and know in the experience of their collection?

Recognizing the necessity of humanity in the process reaffirmed something essential to me about poetry—at its core, it cannot be synthesized by an algorithm or refined (revised, edited) by Silicon Valley innovation. In short, writing poetry cannot be outsourced; it’s the nuance, the context, the particularity of the poet’s voice—these are not replicable by technology. The same is true for the work that happens in the relationship between poet and editor, and no AI or LLM can replace a human being in this role.

What I came to understand is that my role in the process was not to provide answers—it was to ask questions. It was not to impose my own personal aesthetic on the collection. Or rewrite it. It was to reflect back to the poet what I heard and saw –as one reader–in my experience of reading this one book. I discovered how absolutely thrilling it was to be a part of bringing another poet’s book into the world! I had not considered how meaningful it could be to be part of the conversation about poetry—a poetry collection poised to be held in the hands of readers everywhere.

Pre-order My Wise Little Ghost Here!

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Mai-Linh Hong’s debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Award and will be published by Trio House Press in July 2026. ​​​She has been a Voices of Our Nation Fellow, Tin House Scholar, and Susanna Colloredo Fellow in Environmental Writing at the Vermont Studio Center. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, American Association of University Women, Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and more.​​ ​

​Dr. Hong’s research on Asian American and refugee literatures can be found in Amerasia Journal, Verge, MELUS, and other journals and edited volumes. A lifelong crafter and sewist, Dr. Hong is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021).

​Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Waxwing, The Offing, and numerous other journals and in They Rise Like a Wave: Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2022). She was a finalist for the Test Site Poetry Series, the Graybeal-Gowen Prize, and Best of the Net, and a runner-up in the Hayden’s Ferry Review Poetry Contest.

Read the FULL INTERVIEW here!

Pre-order Continental Drift Here!

Leona Sevick: You were trained as a literary scholar and you also earned a JD, but have you always written poetry? And how has your poetry been informed by your training and teaching as a literary scholar?

Mai-Linh Hong: Yes, thanks for that question. I mean, I make jokes about how often I returned to school, but you know, it all comes together at some point. I have written poetry, actually, since I was a child. I would say I have not viewed poetry as part of my professional profile, until very recently. These fields or disciplines, literary studies and law, they’re called disciplines for a reason. They discipline you into certain ways of thinking and writing. On one hand, both fields exposed me to a wide range of other writers, and that has been, in a way, my training in creative writing, just being exposed to so many different writers, and as a teacher as well, reading and teaching so much poetry over the years. But on the other hand, it can impede your creative process. Interestingly, in the last few years, I did have a chance to step away from research for a bit. I had a fellowship for a year, and then, as life does, life threw some curve balls at me, and I had a period of medical leave where I wasn’t able to do my research. But this actually made space for me to go back to an earlier version of myself as a thinker and as a creator, and that’s when I started writing poetry in a more concentrated way. I started thinking of it as a project and not just as a private practice that I did for myself and maybe read to a few friends, but didn’t, you know, put out there in the world. Most of this book was written within a period of about six months. Yeah, it is intense. And I think it took a lot of months of clearing my mind before that could happen. So on one hand, I think the literary studies training can be really good training as a poet, but on the other hand, you have to turn off that critical voice. I’d be curious at some point to hear about your training….

LS: Yeah. My training has been similar. I didn’t go to law school, though. I don’t have that, but I started writing very late, so that wasn’t something that was really part of my life for a long time, but once it was, I didn’t turn back.

MH: Yeah, there’s been a joy in returning to an earlier, more creative part of myself.

LS: That’s great. And boy, you had a lot of productivity in a very concentrated amount of time. And that’s a gift! And you’d had much success with this book. Congratulations!

MH: Thank you.

LS: I wanted to ask you about the poems that engage the Vietnam War and your experience as a child refugee. As a result, the perspective or point of view of the child occurs often in your work. Can you talk a little bit about the experience of writing from that viewpoint?

MH: I’ve had time and space to consider my own upbringing in the last several years, in conjunction with raising my son, who is nine. He was very young during Covid, for example, which was a time when I think a lot of people got introspective, not having the same external social relations that they usually had. For myself as well, it was a time to reflect on who I am as a parent. And that led me to think a lot more about my childhood. And so it makes sense to me that these poems came after that period.

It’s also interesting when you come from a refugee background or any background that involves a lot of trauma or intergenerational memories or big experiences to contend with. It’s almost like you have to deal with that before you can get to other topics. You know, I talked to other writers who are Vietnamese or have similar backgrounds, and they also feel sometimes like, well, I had to write the refugee poems first before I could write the poems that are about other things. I think there’s some amount of that. And I think that part of the narrative arc of this book is moving from that place of like, what happened? Where did I come from? How did I land here? Like moving from that place, to a place of greater possibilities. And so by the end of the book, I think I’m very much in the present moment and thinking about how to live ethically as a human, you know, with the afterlife of refugee migration always informing it, of course. But I think there’s an intertwining of thinking about parenting and thinking about my own childhood. I think it comes up for a lot of folks when they have a young kid, too.

LS: I think so, yeah, we can’t help but reflect in that way. And I love that your title also reflects the sort of shift that you describe: the refugee poems and then a move into a different space. I think that’s very good.

So many of your poems pursue very personal losses. Are these poems difficult to read or to discuss publicly?

MH: Yeah, thank you for asking that. So I think grief showed up in this collection much more than I expected. And maybe that happens naturally, I don’t know. Reflecting on my family history and my childhood, the grief of growing up in a separated family—a family that had gone through involuntary migration, where branches of the family couldn’t access each other—growing up in that kind of environment became much more visible to me over the course of writing these poems. And the grief of that came out in the poems and maybe enabled me to access certain other experiences.

So I do write about my miscarriages and infertility in this collection. It’s not that I set out to do that, and I didn’t set out to write about any particular topic in this collection, but I do think that once grief was on the table, it allowed me to talk about things that had been really difficult to discuss before. I have not publicly talked about having multiple miscarriages and struggling with secondary infertility after I had my son; that’s something most of my colleagues won’t know about me, right? And it’s not something that I’ve written about in a scholarly way. I think the poems are probably my best way to talk about it at this point.

READ THE FULL ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

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LS: I want to ask a question that relates to that point. So I very much enjoy the way you take unlike topics and you sort of, you know, push them together in surprising ways in your poems, as in the poem you just described. You do this also in the “Casey Kasem and the Cannibals” poem, which yokes the rumor of cannibalism among boat people to motherhood. I thought that was fascinating. How do these poems come together in your writing, and how do they begin?

MH: Thank you for that. I think it’s a product of associative thinking and the freedom that poetry gives you to follow lines of thought your brain might put together but not tell you why. As a scholar, you’re not supposed to really pay that much heed, right? You’re not supposed to follow what look like tangents. You’re supposed to have really good transitions when you write an academic article, right? But with poetry, I can trust the association, even when I might not know where it’s headed. So I might start a poem thinking it’s about one thing, and then some other image or situation occurs in the poem, and I have no idea why, but I just go with it, and then somehow it comes back together. And I know that my brain had made connections and it just hadn’t made them in an order that was totally visible to me. And so I’ve learned in poetry writing to just go with it, and things that that want to be together end up together.

Sometimes I have a certain image or idea that’s tumbling around in my mind over days or weeks, and then there’s something else close in time that’s doing the same. Then at some point, I put them together to see what happens, and I realize they’re really about the same thing in some way, right? That there’s a connection there. That’s how those poems happen. I don’t think I’m curating the topics and intentionally putting them together, but I try to trust my gut and allow them to come together. I think you had another question, which I really appreciated, about form and the shapes of poems. I think it’s a similar thing. There’s an intuitive aspect to it. Sometimes one image wants to be next to another image. Sometimes certain lines want to be on the page in a particular physical or visual way; they want to use the space in a particular way. And sometimes I write a poem out in words knowing it’s not in the shape it’s supposed to be in, and it’s during the revision process that it finds its shape. And I might have to try out a few things before something feels right.

READ THE FULL ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

LS: Coherence is a kind of guardrail that you have to attend to, even if you want to play. So I feel that absolutely. Could you talk a little bit about whose work has influenced your writing and in what ways?

READ THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

LS: I think when you study literature and you write in that way, sometimes it can feel intimidating, because you’ve read things and you do have an aesthetic sense, and you have this sort of bar that you set in your mind, and it’s hard to live up to that. Sometimes it’s very hard to live up to that. I used to tell people that I didn’t write poetry because I read and taught so much of it, and I thought, what could I write to add to the conversation? But of course, you find things that other people connect with.

So my last question to you is, what are you working on now? Now that the book is out there and you’re talking about the book and reading from it. Are you taking a break from writing, or are you working on another project?

MH: I am slowly working on another project. Teaching is hard for me to juggle with writing, and now that the semester is wrapping up, I’m hoping to get back to a more regular writing practice.

I finished Continental Drift a little over a year ago, while at a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. During the first half of the residency, I finished my revisions, submitted it to Trio House and a couple other places, and then the rest of the residency, I wrote new work. I remember thinking to myself, this is a new project. The work I wrote in the second half of the residency felt different and was different in form. I was leaning more into form, inherited forms and techniques like the American sonnet and erasure and certain other forms. I was writing more directly about political issues that were on my mind because of the moment that we’re in, probably. Also, like what I said before, there’s a sense that certain things I had to say, I was able to say in Continental Drift, which enabled me to turn a fresh page, to address other topics—there’s a bit of a clean slate.

I have been writing a series of American sonnets. It’s influenced by work by Wanda Coleman and Terrance Hayes, non-rhyming sonnets that are playful and in a mixture of emotional registers, and sometimes very directly critical of political issues. The sonnet form has a rhetorical structure that has allowed me to process in manageable-size pieces what we’re experiencing as a nation. And maybe it has appeared to me as a useful prism for apprehending the extreme losses and trauma that we’re seeing in the news.

LS: Do you engage with the volta? Do you have turns in your sonnets?

READ THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

LS: Well, that sounds exciting. I can’t wait to see those poems.

MH: Thank you.

Read the FULL INTERVIEW here!

Pre-order Continental Drift Here!

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Mai-Linh Hong’s debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Award and will be published by Trio House Press in July 2026. ​​​She has been a Voices of Our Nation Fellow, Tin House Scholar, and Susanna Colloredo Fellow in Environmental Writing at the Vermont Studio Center. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, American Association of University Women, Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and more.​​ ​

​​​Dr. Hong’s research on Asian American and refugee literatures can be found in Amerasia Journal, Verge, MELUS, and other journals and edited volumes. A lifelong crafter and sewist, Dr. Hong is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021).

Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Waxwing, The Offing, and numerous other journals and in They Rise Like a Wave: Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2022). She was a finalist for the Test Site Poetry Series, the Graybeal-Gowen Prize, and Best of the Net, and a runner-up in the Hayden’s Ferry Review Poetry Contest.

Pre-order Continental Drift Here!

Leona Sevick: You were trained as a literary scholar and you also earned a JD, but have you always written poetry? And how has your poetry been informed by your training and teaching as a literary scholar?

Mai-Linh Hong: Yes, thanks for that question. I mean, I make jokes about how often I returned to school, but you know, it all comes together at some point. I have written poetry, actually, since I was a child. I would say I have not viewed poetry as part of my professional profile, until very recently. These fields or disciplines, literary studies and law, they’re called disciplines for a reason. They discipline you into certain ways of thinking and writing. On one hand, both fields exposed me to a wide range of other writers, and that has been, in a way, my training in creative writing, just being exposed to so many different writers, and as a teacher as well, reading and teaching so much poetry over the years. But on the other hand, it can impede your creative process. Interestingly, in the last few years, I did have a chance to step away from research for a bit. I had a fellowship for a year, and then, as life does, life threw some curve balls at me, and I had a period of medical leave where I wasn’t able to do my research. But this actually made space for me to go back to an earlier version of myself as a thinker and as a creator, and that’s when I started writing poetry in a more concentrated way. I started thinking of it as a project and not just as a private practice that I did for myself and maybe read to a few friends, but didn’t, you know, put out there in the world. Most of this book was written within a period of about six months. Yeah, it is intense. And I think it took a lot of months of clearing my mind before that could happen. So on one hand, I think the literary studies training can be really good training as a poet, but on the other hand, you have to turn off that critical voice. I’d be curious at some point to hear about your training….

LS: Yeah. My training has been similar. I didn’t go to law school, though. I don’t have that, but I started writing very late, so that wasn’t something that was really part of my life for a long time, but once it was, I didn’t turn back.

MH: Yeah, there’s been a joy in returning to an earlier, more creative part of myself.

LS: That’s great. And boy, you had a lot of productivity in a very concentrated amount of time. And that’s a gift! And you’d had much success with this book. Congratulations!

MH: Thank you.

LS: I wanted to ask you about the poems that engage the Vietnam War and your experience as a child refugee. As a result, the perspective or point of view of the child occurs often in your work. Can you talk a little bit about the experience of writing from that viewpoint?

MH: I’ve had time and space to consider my own upbringing in the last several years, in conjunction with raising my son, who is nine. He was very young during Covid, for example, which was a time when I think a lot of people got introspective, not having the same external social relations that they usually had. For myself as well, it was a time to reflect on who I am as a parent. And that led me to think a lot more about my childhood. And so it makes sense to me that these poems came after that period.

It’s also interesting when you come from a refugee background or any background that involves a lot of trauma or intergenerational memories or big experiences to contend with. It’s almost like you have to deal with that before you can get to other topics. You know, I talked to other writers who are Vietnamese or have similar backgrounds, and they also feel sometimes like, well, I had to write the refugee poems first before I could write the poems that are about other things. I think there’s some amount of that. And I think that part of the narrative arc of this book is moving from that place of like, what happened? Where did I come from? How did I land here? Like moving from that place, to a place of greater possibilities. And so by the end of the book, I think I’m very much in the present moment and thinking about how to live ethically as a human, you know, with the afterlife of refugee migration always informing it, of course. But I think there’s an intertwining of thinking about parenting and thinking about my own childhood. I think it comes up for a lot of folks when they have a young kid, too.

LS: I think so, yeah, we can’t help but reflect in that way. And I love that your title also reflects the sort of shift that you describe: the refugee poems and then a move into a different space. I think that’s very good.

So many of your poems pursue very personal losses. Are these poems difficult to read or to discuss publicly?

MH: Yeah, thank you for asking that. So I think grief showed up in this collection much more than I expected. And maybe that happens naturally, I don’t know. Reflecting on my family history and my childhood, the grief of growing up in a separated family—a family that had gone through involuntary migration, where branches of the family couldn’t access each other—growing up in that kind of environment became much more visible to me over the course of writing these poems. And the grief of that came out in the poems and maybe enabled me to access certain other experiences.

So I do write about my miscarriages and infertility in this collection. It’s not that I set out to do that, and I didn’t set out to write about any particular topic in this collection, but I do think that once grief was on the table, it allowed me to talk about things that had been really difficult to discuss before. I have not publicly talked about having multiple miscarriages and struggling with secondary infertility after I had my son; that’s something most of my colleagues won’t know about me, right? And it’s not something that I’ve written about in a scholarly way. I think the poems are probably my best way to talk about it at this point.

There’s one poem called “Untitled” that is very directly about my last miscarriage, which happened during the second trimester and came after we knew there was a problem with the pregnancy. We had to make difficult decisions, and it was a very, very difficult time for us as a family. In that poem, I go into some details that I don’t know if I could say in a conversation with someone, except maybe a very, very close friend. But I don’t even know if that’s the case. I think I had to give form to it in some other way, and doing this was really surprising to me, being able to write this poem. But that poem does combine the story of the miscarriage with the news story about the children in Thailand who had been trapped in a cave, the children’s soccer team…

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Reuben Gelley Newman (he/they) is the author of Dear Dear (Trio House Press, 2026), winner of the 2025 Louise Bogan Award, judged by Randall Mann. They also wrote a chapbook, Feedback Harmonies (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024), in homage to the musician Arthur Russell. Reuben is a writer, musician, editor, reviewer and librarian based in New York City. Their poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Salamander, Fairy Tale Review, Northwest Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. You can find them online @joustingsnail (Instagram, Twitter); on Bluesky, they post at @joustingsnail.bsky.social.

Read the FULL INTERVIEW Here!

I had the pleasure of acting as a secondary editor on Reuben Gelley Newman’s forthcoming book of poetry and the Trio House 2025 Louise Bogan Award-winning manuscript, Dear Dear.

Before its release, Reuben chatted with me about his influences, process, and the value of cannon-clashing.

Pre-order Dear Dear Here!

Samantha Hernandez: Having witnessed some of the process of your manuscript editing, I’m very excited to talk to you about your forthcoming book!

Something I really love about your work is how many references you include. You mash up pop stars like Mitski with historic figures like Bach and mythic figures like Poseidon. I was wondering if you could tell me about your thoughts on mythmaking and world-building and your writing process.

Reuben Gelley Newman: I was talking a little bit the other day with a friend, another poet, Ty Raso, and she brought up the phrase canon-clashing, which I thought was really interesting. That phrase fits with some of the poems where I put Bach and Mitski together. I have another one that references both Lorde and Vivaldi.

In terms of mythmaking more broadly, I’m interested in puncturing myths a little bit. I’m interested in thinking about how we remember these figures, like Bach, who has a mythic stature in Western classical music.

READ THE FULL ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

SH: You make frequent use of apostrophe in your poetry, particularly with regard to Russell and Eastman. As a musician and a poet, yourself, what does it feel like to address these figures? How do you make it personal?

RGN: Apostrophe is in some ways a way to make it personal, like a formal method to do so, to connect the musician’s life. If I’m writing about a musician, I’m writing with my own experience of listening to their music.

It’s a tricky thing, because earlier drafts of the manuscript were more solely focused on Russell and Eastman. I was connecting with people who aren’t alive right now, who lived in very different times and places, who have different backgrounds, which is always tricky, and fraught in its own ways. It has to reside in my own connection to the music and that has to be the crux of it. I don’t want to be analyzing music. That’s not what I’m trying to do.

What I am trying to do is evoke the music’s emotions and evoke a story as well, whether it’s my own speaker’s stories, their own tellings of their stories, or thinking about other people, either other artists who have told their stories or people who have helped recover and share their music. In the case of Russell and Eastman, for instance, there’s Tom Lee, Arthur Russell’s partner, and Audika Records, which has released Arthur Russell’s music, and many different people who have helped recover Julius Eastman’s music. Mary Jane Leach is another person who saved scores of Julius’s and then brought them back to light.

There’s so much there. And it’s about what’s personal between me and the artist, but also community and thinking about broader artistic communities that others live in and that I live in as well.

SH: You reference these artistic figures and different historical times, including the AIDS crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the Pulse nightclub shooting. It’s apparent that you’re not shying away from current events in your work. I wanted to ask you about your feelings on incorporating activism in poetry.

RGN: The poetry world, as a whole, publishes amazing work, poems that express great things and have great political urgency and necessity, but I’m not sure that for the most part, it functions as activism.

Whether it’s activism or not, it’s really important to address current events and everything going on in the world around you, whether that’s a poetry of nowness, to some extent, or poetry of just noticing and being aware of my own place in the world as well. It’s complex. It’s important to do, and important to try to do it from an honest and open place, not a place where you’re trying to witness in a way that makes it about yourself.

I don’t want to make any of the current events that I don’t necessarily have personal stake in about myself. Even though I’m a queer man, for instance, I’m not in the same places of danger that people in the Pulse nightclub shooting were. Political experience and identity, and identity as an activist span a lot of ranges.

It’s important to come from a place of honesty and just figuring out what you can do. That’s partly a process that helps with the poems but also thinking about community and friendship within all of the political crises that we see around the world.

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SH: Many of your poems are reflective. They reflect on the process of writing, but there’s also a sense of obligation or commitment to the poem, or more specifically a tending. You write that you “want the husband of the song.” Could you tell me more about that?

READ THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

SH: You’re writing about queerness and desire, but you’re also talking about these historical figures and these musicians. You’re also talking about your family and your own experience in the world. That reminds me, the term rhizomatic appears in your work. And I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about that idea.

READ THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

SH: You’re a musician and a poet. I’m just curious about how those two art forms influence each other. How does your writing influence your music, and the other way around?

RGN: I don’t necessarily think of myself as an active professional musician. I’m not making songs much outside of the poems. I mean, I hum to myself, whistle to myself, sing to myself, and I’ll fiddle around on the piano. I’m often just playing things that are previously written.

It’s more about the music influencing the poetry than the poetry influencing the music. I’m always thinking about the sound of a poem and that’s whether I, however often I read stuff aloud, while revising, I’m not sure if I do that all the time. Regardless, it’s in my head there.

READ THE FULL ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

SH: You also include personal history and family in your poems in addition to your poetic and musical influences.

RGN: I do talk about family and friendship a bit, too, in these poems. It’s important, even as I’m honoring a lot of different figures who I didn’t know, to acknowledge everyone in my life.

My grandma, whose art making has inspired some of my work. I mean, my mom’s an art teacher as well. My dad’s an English professor.

There’s a lot in my family background that has contributed to my development as a writer. And I’m grateful to all my friends as well, whose writing inspires my own.

SH: What is something that you’ve discovered through the process of making this book, either about yourself or your process?

RGN: My art process can be somewhat chaotic. The manuscript itself came together over the course of a few months from different projects that I had had already. It was an emotionally chaotic time in some ways.

And in terms of work as well, I was writing some new stuff that I put into the book. Some of the more political poems and the seasonal poems -- those all came together alongside the political content. I thought, I want to put this conversation with previous work, the title poem of the collection, Dear Dear, and the more musical and ekphrastic poems.

So, the book is a composite of sorts. And my process can be variable. Some poems will come together quickly; other poems will take a while to revise. Some themes will really grab me, and I’ll be very focused on them. That’s apparent through the book, too, in terms of thinking through obsession.

That reflects some level of ADD that I have, which is an awareness that writers work in a lot of different ways, and it might not always make sense for people to have regular routine writing practice, like writing every day.

I’m happy when I want to write and when I have space to write. If I develop regularity at some point, that’d be great. But I’m also interested in seeing what can come from chaos or counterpoint, to use a musical metaphor.

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Reuben Gelley Newman (he/they) is the author of Dear Dear (Trio House Press, 2026), winner of the 2025 Louise Bogan Award, judged by Randall Mann. They also wrote a chapbook, Feedback Harmonies (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024), in homage to the musician Arthur Russell. Reuben is a writer, musician, editor, reviewer, and librarian based in New York City. Their poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Salamander, Fairy Tale Review, Northwest Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. You can find them online @joustingsnail (Instagram, Twitter); on Bluesky, they post at @joustingsnail.bsky.social.

Pre-order Dear Dear Here!

I had the pleasure of acting as a secondary editor on Reuben Gelley Newman’s forthcoming book of poetry and the Trio House 2025 Louise Bogan Award-winning manuscript, Dear Dear.

Before its release, Reuben chatted with me about his influences, process, and the value of cannon-clashing.

Samantha Hernandez: Having witnessed some of the process of your manuscript editing, I’m very excited to talk to you about your forthcoming book!

Something I really love about your work is how many references you include. You mash up pop stars like Mitski with historic figures like Bach and mythic figures like Poseidon. I was wondering if you could tell me about your thoughts on mythmaking and world-building and your writing process.

Reuben Gelley Newman: I was talking a little bit the other day with a friend, another poet, Ty Raso, and she brought up the phrase canon-clashing, which I thought was really interesting. That phrase fits with some of the poems where I put Bach and Mitski together. I have another one that references both Lorde and Vivaldi.

In terms of mythmaking more broadly, I’m interested in puncturing myths a little bit. I’m interested in thinking about how we remember these figures, like Bach, who has a mythic stature in Western classical music.

I have a poem, that’s the last poem in the book, talking about how Bach composed a musical offering for Frederick the Great of Prussia, who, as a royal, is a mythic figure in his own right. There are rumors of — probably more than rumors — some evidence of him being in same-sex relationships. But then I have a line, “Frederick the Great was gay?” At the last minute, even after the editing finished, I added a question mark after that as a way to puncture the myth a little bit. I’m also interested in working through myths, especially in the case of musicians that I’m writing about, like Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman, where I’m thinking about nostalgia and how we make myths out of figures whose public memory is fraught, or is coming back after decades.

SH: You make frequent use of apostrophe in your poetry, particularly with regard to Russell and Eastman. As a musician and a poet yourself, what does it feel like to address these figures? How do you make it personal?

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Jason Prokowiew received the PEN America/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and a Fulbright Scholar Award for War Boys. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, The Guardian, Salon, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Roxane Gay’s “The Audacity,” and on WORLD Channel’s Stories from the Stage, where his piece “Sing” is the most-watched in the show’s history. He’s received support from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Ragdale, and the Mass Cultural Council. He lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband, Dave, and their greyhound, Champ.

Read the FULL INTERVIEW here!

Pre-order War Boys Here!

Trinity McFadden: Your father was ten years old when the Nazis invaded Belarus in 1941, and against all odds, he survived. You detail his harrowing journey in War Boys: A Father and Son Memoir (Trio House Press, July 1, 2026). What can you tell us about his childhood before the Nazi’s invaded, and how did his life change during the summer of 1941?

Jason Prokowiew: My father lived a life of privilege in Belarus before the war. His mother, my grandma Valentina, was a high-ranking Communist Party member who led the Chemistry Workers’ Union. She would have been a trusted Party member, responsible for a lot of people, and that job would have come with perks for my father and his older sister Rema.

Were he not one of the privileged kids, he might not have been at one of these summer camps and away from his family when the Nazis invaded.

Had the Nazis never invaded Belarus, my father would probably have continued taking all of these luxuries for granted. When I asked him about the pre-war years, he sounds like a normal, somewhat spoiled child of a Party member. It was only after all of this disappeared, very quickly, as a result of war, that he recognized the privileges.

READ MORE TO THIS QUESTION IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

TM: How did your father survive the Nazi occupation?

READ THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

TM: You were twenty-two years old when you sat across from your father in 1999 with a tape recorder and asked him to “start at the beginning.” Your father had been an abusive alcoholic for most of your childhood. When did you decide you needed to understand him rather than avoid or resent him?

JP: My therapist is quick to remind me that my brain was not even fully formed at the time I began interviewing my dad, so it’s only in my older age (I will be fifty this year) that I see the benefits of interviewing my dad at that age.

At the time, I was spurred to do the interviews because I was in college, exploring Russian language and history as a means of understanding myself and my heritage, and because one Russian politics professor asked me questions I didn’t know the answers to: what had happened to my dad’s family, and how the heck had this little boy survived the war?

So, at twenty-two, I think I was compelled on a sub-conscious level to understand my father as a way to understand why my childhood had been filled with such darkness because of him, but I didn’t have the language to say or understand that then. It’s weird, I would spend many nights when I first started interviewing my dad in my bedroom, journaling about all these awful feelings I had towards myself, borne from my abusive and neglectful childhood, hating my father, but then put that aside and go to work on the interviews. My father had no idea about the journals I filled with my anger towards him. Sometimes I would just scratch the pen into the pages until the pages tore, just trying to do something with the rage I felt.

I’ve always felt like my inner resources pushed me towards healing, and that on some unconscious level, this inner voice guided me towards interviewing my father as a means of healing myself. I didn’t have the understanding of this at twenty-two. I think my understanding of what I was doing then came to me later in life, in my thirties, when I could look back and recognize, “Oh, I was trying to understand what made him such an abusive parent, so I could heal, and understand why my upbringing had been what it was.” I had to understand where he’d come from to get there.

TM: War Boys is being published twenty-seven years after you first interviewed your father and twenty-four years after he passed away. What has the writing process looked like for you? When did you know you wanted to turn both of your stories into a book?

JP: I think I knew the narrative value of my father’s story even in childhood. He told them in very pat ways that he and others could digest. They were survival/overcoming/hero stories. I was raised on such stories in the books and movies I digested as a child. I also observed listeners when he told his stories, and there was always a degree of enthrallment. My father’s stories are exciting: they have built-in bad guys and a sympathetic main character in the little boy version of my dad. I felt all of this as a child, even if I didn’t have language for it then.

The War Boys writing process has been wild. It began with the interviews in 1999 that my dad and I finished in 2002, and there have been twists and turns ever since. I worked on a draft as a part of my MFA from 2003-2006, I transcribed the fifty hours of interviews with my dad during that period, and I did my first research trip to Belarus in 2006, where I found the paper trail that backed up my dad’s unlikely story.

I worked on the first draft until 2009, when I developed writer’s block. If you told me before experiencing writer’s block that it was a real thing, I would have told you it was made up. But I spent months staring at a blank page, unable to get anything onto it. So, as I’ve often joked: like any sensible person with writer’s block would, I went to law school. Between 2009 and 2024, I was engaged with the study and practice of law, but during that time, I thought about War Boys (which was called One Little Bolshevik and then Raised by Wolves before I named it War Boys in 2022).

I knew I’d come back to the manuscript. I always felt excited when I talked about War Boys. When I opened the draft again in 2018, I announced it to my husband, like, “Okay, this is about to be a bigger thing in my life again.” I knew I was ready to go again.

At some point between 2018 and 2022, I finished my first draft—my biggest goal being to move my father across the pages and get him to the shores of the US in 1949, which I’d decided was a main stopping point in the dad narrative of War Boys.

I started taking classes at Boston’s GrubStreet in 2018, where I found community. The biggest transformation came between 2021 and 2022 when I did a year-long class at GrubStreet called Memoir Incubator, taught by my now friend/mentor/champion Alysia Abbott. I was fortunate to be invited into a class with nine other memoirists who I consider sisters and a brother now. It was clear to me entering that class that what I needed to do, was add more of me to War Boys. That’s what the memoirs I loved did—told a bigger story while also telling the author’s story. I am thinking of anything by Julia Blackburn, Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward, Fact of a Body by Alex Marzano Lesnevich, Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz. I was terrified to dive into the muck of my abusive childhood, but deep dives were what the memoirs I was in love with were doing.

READ MORE TO THIS QUESTION IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

TM: This is also your story as a Queer man navigating your own identity while dealing with an abusive father. How did your emerging queer identity complicate your relationship with him?

JP: Thank you for asking that. War Boys is also very much a Queer story, because it’s my story, and shows the journey of my Queerness, which really began for me in high school, starting in 1991/1992. It took some nerve for me to come out when I was sixteen in my particular family and community, to a mother and father that didn’t even say the word “gay” out loud, unless, as I write in War Boys, it was with a sneer. But I think I had an innate sense, even if I didn’t know the ins and outs of my father’s story, that he was a survivor, and that I had some of that survival strength in me, too. I write in War Boys about coming out to my parents one night my junior year of high school, and how the next day it felt like someone had died. I packed a bag and left home for a week, because I didn’t want to be around my parents if they were going to act like I was dead because I was Queer. In that week I stayed with friends, and experienced their parents’ love at a time when my parents refused me any.

When I went home at the end of the week to get more clothes, my mother was beside herself that I’d been gone a week, and I had the nerve to say, “Now you see what it’s like to live without me, is that what you want?” She didn’t. My mother’s 180 about Queerness began then.

My father never really made that much of a change. He told me shortly after I came out that he would support me in all things but my Queerness. At that point, my father was six years sober, a drastically different person than the drunken monster I knew for the first ten years of my life, so at the very least I was able to keep reminding him of who I was without fear of his abuse about it. My father was a curious person, an MIT graduate, a polyglot, and he liked talking to me about ideas and academics, and I never hesitated to tell him about the Queer theory or art I was studying, but we’d occasionally, over the next nine years between my coming out and his passing away, reach an impasse where he’d click his tongue in frustration and say something like, “Are you still on that gay thing?” I’d fire back, “Am I still on being myself? Yes.” So, we had this conflict about who I was that lasted until he died. But I was always honest with him about who I was after sixteen. For example, when there was a separate lavender graduation for the Queer kids at Oberlin, where I was speaking about a Queer studies project I’d done, my father marched into the auditorium for that moment, and heard what I had to say, and saw me get my little purple Lavender Graduation tassel. Our relationship around my Queerness always remained complicated.

TM: The book explores how trauma gets passed down through generations. What do you want readers, especially those dealing with their own family trauma, to take away from your story?

JP: Oof. I write in War Boys about my mental health struggles and how they took root and thrived at the intersection of familial neglect and abuse, community abuse because I was fat and Queer and targeted often for one or both of these—my familial home was not a safe place for me, or my siblings, because of the wartime trauma my father carried into parenthood, and my community was not a safe place for me as a fat or Queer person either.

I do my best in the narrative to explain how I pulled myself out of a spiral of suicidality that formed because of all of these factors, and it’s not an easy journey. My particular path is complicated—I don’t know many survivors whose journey isn’t. I chart mine in War Boys through suicidality, panic attacks, depression, medication, Al-Anon, therapies of various sorts, PTSD, an estrangement from most of my family or origin, and with a critical eye towards the hurtful voices that can course through our heads as survivors.

I hope that readers, including those with wartime trauma in their families, can see one way through, and gather some strength as they make their own unique way through. In War Boys you’ll see me reach out for help, see how I observed families unlike my own—healthier families with better communication skills, families that didn’t use violence as a primary means of communication—and you’ll see me want and strive for those in my own life and home. You’ll see me fail, flail, and sometimes do well. Really, that’s what much of my writing is about—working, often with great difficulty, towards a life that doesn’t match what you were told you should expect, or that you grew to believe was your lot in life.

You’ll see my friends and teachers see my flailing at times when I didn’t know I was, and intervene. On the occasions when I still have really hard days, my therapist reminds me that mental health is a journey and not a destination. I hope readers with backgrounds similar to mine read about my struggle and know that the struggle is normal, but that there are tools to use and ways forward.

Change is really difficult, but possible, and you don’t have to do any of it perfectly. Healing is often messy, and there are people willing to witness the messy. You are not alone in this world.

Read the FULL INTERVIEW here!

Pre-order War Boys Here!

Find more from Jason Prokowiew here:

https://www.jasonwprokowiew.com/

www.warboysbook.com

https://www.instagram.com/jasonprokowiew/

https://bsky.app/profile/jasonprokowiew.bsky.social

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Jason Prokowiew received the PEN America/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and a Fulbright Scholar Award for War Boys. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, The Guardian, Salon, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Roxane Gay’s “The Audacity,” and on WORLD Channel’s Stories from the Stage, where his piece “Sing” is the most-watched in the show’s history. He’s received support from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Ragdale, and the Mass Cultural Council. He lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband, Dave, and their greyhound, Champ.

Pre-order War Boys Here!

Trinity McFadden: Your father was ten years old when the Nazis invaded Belarus in 1941, and against all odds, he survived. You detail his harrowing journey in War Boys: A Father and Son Memoir (Trio House Press, July 1, 2026). What can you tell us about his childhood before the Nazi’s invaded, and how did his life change during the summer of 1941?

Jason Prokowiew: My father lived a life of privilege in Belarus before the war. His mother, my grandma Valentina, was a high-ranking Communist Party member who led the Chemistry Workers’ Union. She would have been a trusted Party member, responsible for a lot of people, and that job would have come with perks for my father and his older sister Rema.

For example, they would have had access to the Youth Palaces, places where Party members’ children could engage in hobbies and other extra-curriculars. He recalled that the Youth Palaces, which were extended into the summer camps for Party children, were places he could act in and write plays, or try his hand at music or sports.

He also remembered them as places with bountiful supplies of food. Food is a major driving force in my dad’s life after the war landed in Belarus, as he faced hunger daily for well over a year after the invasion, so I am not surprised he spoke so effusively about the food at the Youth Palaces.

Were he not one of the privileged kids, he might not have been at one of these summer camps and away from his family when the Nazis invaded.

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Ana María Caballero is an award-winning Colombian-American poet and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores embodiment, memory, care, and the cultural ethics of emerging technologies, while reimagining poetry and the book for contemporary and digital worlds.

Caballero is the author of eight books. Her first book of poetry, Entre domingo y domingo, received Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize and was rereleased by Valparaíso Press in 2023; an Italian translation was published by Edizioni Ensemble in 2025. Her books A Petit Mal (nonfiction) and Mammal (poetry) received the International Beverly Prize and the Steel Toe Books Award in Poetry, respectively. Her forthcoming poetry collection, Material, received Trio House Press’ Editors Choice Award and will be published in 2026. Her debut novel, Cuts, received the 2025 Clay Reynolds Prize from Texas Review Press.

Pre-order Material Here!

Just as cherry blossoms peek out against the sky, I chatted with Ana María Caballero about the materials that create life, the idea of gendered sacrifice, and where humor emanates from.

Cynthia Via: How did you get into writing poetry? Was this always a part of your life?

Ana María Caballero: I began writing poetry seriously when I was twelve. I say “seriously” because that’s when I noticed I had a writing problem: I’d write poems in the back of my school journals and fill them up so quickly, I’d need to bike to the drugstore to get new ones. I knew, then, in seventh grade, in line at the drugstore, that I was a writer.

CV: That’s a good problem to have.

How does your experience in performance, sculpture and art installation, influence your poems, and how has it expanded your writing with this most recent collection?

AMC: I’m constantly thinking about ways my poems can occupy physical space, not just the rectangle of the page. I envision language thriving in three-dimensional materiality while remaining true to its essence, to readability, to the possibility of personal interpretation, to open-ended ambiguity. Depending on the setting, these can become complicated considerations.

CV: What was the thought process behind the title of the collection, Material?

AMC: Life itself is material. Much of my work is about zooming in on the small, daily exchanges we don’t consider important and finding the hidden layers of significant conflict, of systemic patterns, of subtle subjugation that become mass, matter, material for art.

CV: What was the intention behind the different sections and the placement of those poems? What do the titles represent?

AMC: I wanted to organize the book in a way that was at once surprising and intuitive. I worked with a wonderful editor, Jan Beatty, who helped me orchestrate the flow. We landed on a structure that moves the reader forward while causing them to stop in their tracks and take a moment to read closely. Kris Bigalk from Trio also helped adjust the flow in the book’s final review.

There’s a section on more political poems, for example, but a few works invite us to think about how the political manifests beyond current events and headlines, about how power affects the ways our bodies move through the world. Subliminal, systemic influences limit our daily experiences, especially as women.

There’s also a consideration for long versus short forms. I include an essay woven into one of the shorter poem sections, for example, so that we can consider the kick of prosaic vis à vis the punch of brief.

The titles come from the poems themselves, but when these same words are taken out of context their meaning expands. Even within the same collection, language’s shapeshifting ability is laid bare.

CV: A few of these poems reference the landscape of motherhood, which resonated with me. What has this landscape revealed about writing while “mothering”?

AMC: I write to reveal myself to myself. There’s no final word on motherhood. There are millions and millions of individual experiences, each equally valid. I believe these experiences create meaningful connections when we’re honest about them. I hope that in being honest myself, I invite others to also be honest.

CV: While reading “Bedtime” and “The Many-Headed Thing,” I thought about the sacrifices women make as mothers. Is there something to be gained creatively from sacrifices of the body and the time given?

AMC: I don’t think sacrifice is a virtue. That’s, verbatim, the subtitle for my most recent book, Mammal: Sacrifice is not a virtue. There are idealized notions of gendered sacrifice. Women should do more, we should put ourselves second, the child, its care, the home comes first. The same doesn’t apply to other genders. I don’t think it’s helpful to view sacrifice through the lens of personal growth, but rather through the lens of personal empowerment, as it regards resisting this notion if it doesn’t serve our lives.

CV: Some of your poems struck me as being slightly humorous or sardonic, especially the endings. Where does this type of humor come from?

AMC: Late-night shows hinge on making fun of things that are not funny. Through laughter, we’re able to process traumatic moments. Through humor, we face dark truths, come close to them, examine them, perhaps even deal with them. We laugh, but there’s a crying to that laughing.

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CV: The poem, “The Committee Announces a Sequel,” contains language alluding to a digital object. What was the intentionality behind this poem, and where do these images come from?

AMC: Of course, there’s no literal gadget. The poem makes fun of our society, where we think we can fix everything by hitting reset. Turn it on and turn it off, and it’ll work again. I poke fun but, at the end of the day, the situation is not funny. The speaker keeps going. It’s the dark edge of humor that allows us to come close to things that are true and hurtful.

CV: You also write about odd moments that some people might consider taboos. For example, in the poem “I’m bleeding” and “You Still Shower with Your ten-year -old.” Why are these important moments to highlight?

AMC: Writing these poems wasn’t necessarily a political choice. Rather I wanted to register moments I treasured. I wish my son, who is going on fourteen, was ten again, and we could have that moment of sweetness and tenderness, which is gone for the rest of our lives. Now there’s only the adolescent push and pull.

CV: It’s always interesting to read intimate moments. You’re like, should I be reading this? But maybe that’s the point of not just art, but poetry to show you something that other people may not be willing to share.

AMC: Verse doesn’t have to be confessional for it to be effective, but I do feel it needs to be true. When poetry is too abstract, inscrutable, generalized or removed from personal experience, it falls flat on its face.

CV: You speak about how every reading of a text is its own world? How readers interpret that text can be very different depending on the environment. What are you hoping readers will receive from this text when they receive it in this form?

AMC: When people read my work, they often come out thinking: Hey, I’m not alone. That’s a very powerful feeling, communion through text and through reading. I hope this continues.

CV: The poem, “They’ll Become Objects” made me sad, because at the end of the day, we all become photos, stored away in a dusty closet. How do we not become objects? Is it a cold thing to end up as nothing more than photographs?

AMC: Borges said we forget we’re hanging out with corpses. We forget we’re mortal, and all of us are going to disappear. It’s not a matter of it being depressing or fatalistic but rather appreciating the time we have in a more deliberate way because of this knowledge. To use our evanescence as empowerment.

CV: I can definitely see that.

Even though this collection has influences from the digital world, we are also reminding readers of the humanity we’re leaving out. In “Items I Scour The Internet To Find,” why were these words important to surface as a distinction from what technology is usually meant for?

AMC: We think that these meaningful exchanges occur in the flesh and blood world, but they also come from online interactions. This poem acknowledges the fleshiness of virtual space.

CV: Yea, and it doesn’t just have to be about doom scrolling.

Any book recommendations?

AMC: I’m a big fan of Louise Glück, Julie Marie Wade, P. Scott Cunningham, Denise Duhamel, Campbell McGrath. Rachel Morgan is a wonderful poet as well. Jan Beatty, another wonderful writer.

Pre-order Material Here!

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We’re thrilled to share a sneak peek at Girl Gone Wild, the debut memoir from Courtney Kocak, forthcoming from Trio House Press on April 1.

Below you’ll find details about the book, cover reveal, early praise, and Kocak’s bio—everything you need to get a feel for this sharp, searching, fearless exploration of ambition, sexuality, and becoming oneself.

Pre-order Girl Gone Wild here!

To celebrate and learn more, please join us for a live conversation next Wednesday, March 31st, at 2 pm CT, when Kocak will sit down with Trio House Press’s own Lili Gourley for an intimate live interview about the making of Girl Gone Wild, the questions it wrestles with, and the journey from lived experience to the page.

In the meantime, enjoy this early recording from Kocak and Gourley, with questions on the writing process, the Girls Gone Wild bus tour, and sex positivity.

Want to hear more? Join us live next week.

Join us live on March 31st at 2 pm CT!

GIRL GONE WILD

The Hollywood Misadventures of a Small-Town Girl

Tales of ambition, delusion, drugs, sex, and misogyny... including selling T-shirts on the Girls Gone Wild bus

GIRL GONE WILD is the memoir of an unruly metamorphosis from girl to woman. Author Courtney Kocak is an actress-turned-writer who transplanted herself from the quiet cornfields of rural Minnesota to the filthy heart of Hollywood in her painfully protracted quest to “make it” in a time before our lives were flattened by the internet—a longer, more arduous journey than she ever imagined, full of unexpected detours like falling in love with an abusive asshole and eventually having his abortion, a Model Mayhem photo shoot gone wrong, acting in independent films, a Craigslist massage for money, getting paid to kick a guy in the balls, getting hooked on Adderall, selling T-shirts on the Girls Gone Wild tour, and so much more.

GIRL GONE WILD is a collection of exploits and delusions about chasing your dreams with reckless abandon and what happens when their pursuit becomes a new kind of trap. In this memoir-in-essays, Kocak takes readers along on her heady metamorphosis from girl to woman and from dreamer to professional artist, as she is transformed in this unwitting feminist coming-of-age. It’s a wild, cringeworthy, and often heartbreaking tale, but with Kocak’s wry wit and clear-eyed accounting, it’s nothing short of captivating.

EARLY PRAISE:

“Girl Gone Wild is fiery, sparkly, spicy. It’s brash. It’s just—wild. It’s a fire sign on the page.”

—CHLOE CALDWELL, author of Women and Trying

“A riveting account told with irresistible vulnerability and mastery.”

—ANTONIA CRANE, author of Spent

“Nobody tells a story like Courtney Kocak... She has an exceptional ability to blend humor with the depth of human emotion.”

—BASSEY IKPI, New York Times bestselling author of I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying

“Courtney Kocak’s writing is fresh, funny, and unapologetically feminist—like hanging out with your smartest friend with the best stories.”

—HALLEY SUTTON, author of The Lady Upstairs and The Hurricane Blonde

COURTNEY KOCAK is a writer, podcaster, and comedian who splits time between Austin and Los Angeles. She wrote for Amazon’s Emmy-winning animated series Danger & Eggs and Netflix’s Know It All. She’s produced a slew of highly-ranked podcasts and currently hosts three of her own with over two million downloads to date: Private Parts Unknown, about love and sexuality around the world, The Bleeders, about book writing and publishing, and Podcast Bestie, a best friend to podcasters trying to grow and monetize their shows (and a popular Substack). As a writer, her bylines include The New York Times, The Washington Post, LA Times, Cosmopolitan, Slate, HuffPost, Business Insider, and more. Her debut memoir, Girl Gone Wild, with Trio House Press, is coming April 1, 2026!

Join us live on March 31st at 2 pm CT!

Leila Farjami is an Iranian-American poet, translator, and psychotherapist. Her debut poetry collection, Daughter of Salt, the Editor’s Selection, is slated for publication in July 2026 by Trio House Press. She is the recipient of The Iowa Review Poetry Prize (2025), The Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Award in Poetry (2024), and PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship (2025).

Farjami is the author of several books of Persian poetry and translation. She loves world literature, photography, painting, cooking, depth psychology, and nature. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, where she works as a trauma-focused psychotherapist (EMDR) in private practice at The Camden Center, an internationally recognized center for the treatment of psychiatric, addictive, and eating disorders.

Read more in the full interview here!

Ali Shafer: What do you want someone reading your book to understand about you, your writing, and/or this book in particular? What do you want them to go into it knowing, or at least to come away with?

Leila Farjami: Going into it, I don’t know if I have any certain expectations of the reader. I don’t have any particular requirements, but what I’d like to leave the reader with is perhaps a greater understanding of the sense of alienation and displacement that comes with migration or immigration.

Certainly more appreciation and understanding of women who have been impacted specifically by misogyny and patriarchy running rampant in the world. My poems tend to be more localized in Iran because a lot of the poems do take place or reflect on experiences in Iran and the war, the Islamic Republic regime, and how it took many, many civil freedoms away from us. So I’d like for people to appreciate the impacts of all that, and also, you know, towards the end of the book, when poems become more personal about grieving the imminent loss of a mother, there are also, I think, some reflections on grief and what it means individually for the reader and to the reader. Maybe that’s also something, a sense of tenderness I’d like for them to walk away with.

AS: How did you get into poetry writing? Or reading and writing in general.

LF: I first got into poetry reading as a little girl because I would say not just in Iran but in the Middle East there’s a strong poetic culture. There have been many famous classical poets such as Khayyam, Rumi, Hafez, and Saadi, and I remember growing up, my mom was very appreciative of Saadi and Hafez, especially. So I remember before I even learned how to read, she would read these very profound, dense, and meaning-heavy classical poems of Hafez and Saadi, and she would sometimes interpret those poems, those verses to me. That was like the first spark for me, the initial spark for the passion that then came, sort of, I don’t want to say my mission, but my inspiration in life.

When I was about sixteen, so I’d already arrived in the US and been living here by that time for about three years, I remember feeling extremely isolated and alienated and we were living in the suburbs of Los Angeles back then, a little city named Irvine and there was a man-made lake that I would often go by and I remember sitting on one of the rocks and I just had a pen and some papers at hand and I started to write very, very poorly. I wrote nevertheless. It was very cathartic, those moments, that experience, and I always think that you know poetry is the art form of the poor man because you only need a piece of paper and a pen, and that’s all I had actually. My family was economically struggling because we were still relatively new in the States.

So that’s how I got started, and then I mainly focused on classical Persian poetry because that’s what I had been originally exposed to as a child, so it kind of bridged back through those wonderful memories I had. I read and read and read and read insatiably, wrote in Persian mainly, and then ten-twelve years ago I started to write in English as well, but I didn’t send out my poems for publication till three years ago. I’ve published many books in Persian, and I’ve translated lots of poems into Persian for Iranian poets to be able to read and study, and for others, whoever’s interested in Iran, but yeah, I guess by those standards, I’m relatively new in the English poetry landscape.

AS: There are a lot of complex mother-daughter and interpersonal female relations in this book. Why was that important for you to focus on?

LF: Really, upon reflection, it came together naturally because I think the intentionality was to be as honest and transparent about this relationship dynamic as I could. And I think in that way it was maybe the only way that the immensity and the depth of the group could make sense to me, and the way that I’m grieving and sort of suffering through her illness. The way she’s suffering through her illness. That increases tenderness and awareness, I think, between the two of us. I do trauma-focused psychotherapy for a living, and I’m saying this because a part of me is really attuned to picking up on subtleties in relational dynamics, especially in traumatic relational dynamics, or trauma-based relational dynamics. I think I could not just glean over what happened in our earlier history between my mother and I. We did enter therapy when I was in my early twenties, and we worked through our issues together and got very, very close, which I’m really thankful for and always appreciate her commitment and the love that she had for me to be vulnerable and to support me and work with me on this relationship together.

So this all actually came naturally because I was so focused and invested in our relationship and that invited me into sort of this palace of mysteries about all these women whom I have some information of, but the rest of it I kind of fantasize about and I write it down on paper because I’ve not only heard stories but read some histories of Iranian women. That’s how the theme of this book just came about naturally; it wasn’t planned.

READ MORE IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

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AS: How did you decide when to switch languages in the book? Was it out of necessity to communicate something specific that the other language couldn’t, or an intentional effort on your part to include both?

LF: The way I used Persian words in a few poems in this collection, those words are the words that have no other replacement for me in the English language. Though we have synonyms, for me, those are the words that I may have heard a lot. Like, there’s my father asking “چرا؟ چرا؟ چرا؟” which is “why why why” which is kind of typical, or there are words that have to do with when we were in the public bathhouse with my mother. There are certain words that, to me, are so culture-based that I didn’t want to westernize them.

AS: How did you decide the division and placements of poems in your sections, grief vs resurrection? Grief, I feel, is maybe easier to assume, but resurrection in particular I find more open to interpretation, so I wondered about your intentions.

LF: I think the resurrection part, in retrospect, maybe I should’ve actually titled it resilience, but that’s such an overused word in therapy. So resurrection is not like this Lazarus figure coming back from the dead, but it’s more like this human capacity to be resilient enough to bear more pain and ache and suffering in life than we thought we could. And those are the poems that are less focused on grief but more on these memories that we have either pulled through our traumas with my mother, or I have this appreciation of the intrinsic strength that each of us has as human beings. Then, towards the end, it’s really about her frailty and living in this liminal space between life and death.

And I also want to say this, when it comes to Persian, if I’m speaking to my husband, who is Iranian, about my mother’s passing, I don’t use the word dying or death, I use the word flight. Like here, I wanted to say the liminal space between her life and flight. I’m kind of emphasizing this because the last poem ends on this sense of not resurrection but continuity, that it is really a flight, it is not death as in annihilation.

AS: Recommendations?

LF: I have many favorites as a bilingual poet. The Iranian classical poets I’ve loved and read for years are Hafez and Rumi. In the past several years, I’ve been deeply nourished by the work of Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Carson, among many others. I recently finished Death Does Not End at the Sea by Gbenga Adesina, which was especially mindblowing, impactful, and inspiring. I’ve also loved spending time with books by Sarah Ghazal Ali, Joan Kwon Glass (who has a blurb on my book and read and commented on it prior to revision—I recommend her books Night Swim and Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms), Bhanu Kapil, Vievee Francis, Dianne Seuss with her sonnets, and Victoria Chang.

I tend to live inside poetry collections for a long time, taking notes, looking up words, and returning to certain lines again and again. Sometimes it takes me a while to finish a book. I often find myself revisiting poets I’ve loved for years, including Lorca and Mahmoud Darwish.

AS: What’s next for Leila?

LF: So I have another manuscript I’m still kind of chiseling. I submitted it a couple of times before and got into some good places with it, but this is before Daughter of Salt. That one really focuses on talking about trauma, types of trauma, the patriarchy, and fathers, whereas this one focuses on mothers.

Daughter of Salt is coming out in July, so I’m really focused on that. I’ll be going to AWP this year in Baltimore for sure. There is one reading I’m doing for SWWIM Daily there on the 4th or 5th, an evening where there are poets who have been published by SWWIM and other journals sharing our work together, so that’s gonna be my first reading from the book. There’s a writers conference in Chicago, June 26th-29th, that I’m attending as well.

READ MORE IN THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

AS: Where can we keep up with you?

LF: My website is leilafarjami.com, and I’m on Instagram @leila_poetry.

Questions answered in the full interview:

• How has your line of work [as a psychotherapist] and education impacted your writing?

• In poetry, there are a lot of ways you can express the same thing. In your poem “What did not happen,” “you” refers to your mom, while you remain in the 1st person pov. I was curious about the choice to make the situation where you are talking to your mom about things she went through that you did not. What motivated that perspective for the poem?

• Would you say your book is more critical of or reverent to religion as it is referenced?

• There’s a lot of great symbolism surrounding women and liquids/water in your book; do you view this ability to compare the two as more of a good, bad, or an ambiguous thing?

• Plus extended answers to some questions

Read more in the full interview here!

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Pre-Order Daughter of Salt here!

Leila Farjami is an Iranian-American poet, translator, and psychotherapist. Her debut poetry collection, Daughter of Salt, the Editor’s Selection, is slated for publication in July 2026 by Trio House Press. She is the recipient of The Iowa Review Poetry Prize (2025), The Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Award in Poetry (2024), and PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship (2025).

Farjami is the author of several books of Persian poetry and translation. She loves world literature, photography, painting, cooking, depth psychology, and nature. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, where she works as a trauma-focused psychotherapist (EMDR) in private practice at The Camden Center, an internationally recognized center for the treatment of psychiatric, addictive, and eating disorders.

Ali Shafer: What do you want someone reading your book to understand about you, your writing, and/or this book in particular? What do you want them to go into it knowing, or at least to come away with?

Leila Farjami: Going into it, I don’t know if I have any certain expectations of the reader. I don’t have any particular requirements, but what I’d like to leave the reader with is perhaps a greater understanding of the sense of alienation and displacement that comes with migration or immigration.

Certainly more appreciation and understanding of women who have been impacted specifically by misogyny and patriarchy running rampant in the world. My poems tend to be more localized in Iran because a lot of the poems do take place or reflect on experiences in Iran and the war, the Islamic Republic regime, and how it took many, many civil freedoms away from us. So I’d like for people to appreciate the impacts of all that, and also, you know, towards the end of the book, when poems become more personal about grieving the imminent loss of a mother, there are also, I think, some reflections on grief and what it means individually for the reader and to the reader. Maybe that’s also something, a sense of tenderness I’d like for them to walk away with.

AS: How did you get into poetry writing? Or reading and writing in general.

LF: I first got into poetry reading as a little girl because I would say not just in Iran but in the Middle East there’s a strong poetic culture. There have been many famous classical poets such as Khayyam, Rumi, Hafez, and Saadi, and I remember growing up, my mom was very appreciative of Saadi and Hafez, especially. So I remember before I even learned how to read, she would read these very profound, dense, and meaning-heavy classical poems of Hafez and Saadi, and she would sometimes interpret those poems, those verses to me. That was like the first spark for me, the initial spark for the passion that then came, sort of, I don’t want to say my mission, but my inspiration in life.

When I was about sixteen, so I’d already arrived in the US and been living here by that time for about three years, I remember feeling extremely isolated and alienated and we were living in the suburbs of Los Angeles back then, a little city named Irvine and there was a man-made lake that I would often go by and I remember sitting on one of the rocks and I just had a pen and some papers at hand and I started to write very, very poorly. I wrote nevertheless. It was very cathartic, those moments, that experience, and I always think that you know poetry is the art form of the poor man because you only need a piece of paper and a pen, and that’s all I had actually. My family was economically struggling because we were still relatively new in the States.

So that’s how I got started, and then I mainly focused on classical Persian poetry because that’s what I had been originally exposed to as a child, so it kind of bridged back through those wonderful memories I had. I read and read and read and read insatiably, wrote in Persian mainly, and then ten-twelve years ago I started to write in English as well, but I didn’t send out my poems for publication till three years ago. I’ve published many books in Persian, and I’ve translated lots of poems into Persian for Iranian poets to be able to read and study, and for others, whoever’s interested in Iran, but yeah, I guess by those standards, I’m relatively new in the English poetry landscape.

AS: There’s a lot of great symbolism surrounding women and liquids/water in your book; do you view this ability to compare the two as more of a good, bad, or an ambiguous thing?

Read more

Lisa Brodsky is a Pushcart-nominated writer and public health professional whose work explores intergenerational trauma, cultural inheritance, spiritual resilience, and the quiet rituals families use to navigate uncertainty. She holds a Master of Public Health and is completing her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Hamline University, where her work bridges cultural narrative, lyric nonfiction, and trauma-informed storytelling.

For more than twenty years, Brodsky has worked in public health systems across Minnesota, including several years inside jails and juvenile detention centers. Her background in community health, public systems leadership, and trauma-responsive practices uniquely positions her to interrogate the intersections of survival, care, and memory.

Her creative nonfiction and short prose have appeared in “Otherwise Engaged”, “Pictura Journal”, “Memoirist”, “Bright Flash Literary Review”, “Circle of Salt”, and other literary journals. She is a two-time winner of the Patsy Lea Core Award for poetry and serves as a nonfiction and poetry reader for Trio House Press.

When I volunteered to be a reader for Trio House Press, I thought I knew what I was doing. I imagined myself in a tweed blazer with brown leather elbow patches, sipping Earl Grey tea with my pinky finger up and murmuring, “Hmm, excellent enjambment” and “awesome alliteration” (see what I did there?) Instead, I spent most of my time in sweatpants with my hair in a messy bun, surrounded by towering virtual piles of poetry and creative nonfiction manuscripts, whispering, “Wow… this is really good.”

I read so many submissions that my eyeballs briefly staged a walkout. But I read on! I couldn’t stop. And, somewhere between poem #218 about the cosmos and memoir #193 involving a complicated relationship with soup, something amazing happened: I learned lots of things. Real things. Useful things. Things that made me stop, grin, and say out loud, “Ooh, I like that.”

Some lessons that I learned:

• Poetry lesson #1: Line breaks are just like dating. If you break too soon, everything feels rushed. If you break too late, everyone loses interest.

• Poetry lesson #2: If you include a raven in a poem, it becomes 13% more profound. Hey, I don’t make the rules.

• Poetry lesson #3: If a poem starts with a moth, a funeral, or a childhood memory involving a river, you should hold onto something. Things are about to get interesting!

• Poetry lesson #4: There is no wrong place to put a metaphor. Hallway? Sure. Refrigerator? Absolutely. Inside a toaster? Why not.

• Poetry lesson #5: If the poem contains exactly one wolf, it is about longing. If it contains two wolves, it is definitely about divorce.

• Poetry lesson #6: Poets apparently live in a world where everyone is always gazing out a window. I began to worry about their Vitamin D.

• CNF #1: Every memoir contains at least one grandmother who has beautiful hands. And honestly, all of them are beautiful. Hands down (Sorry.)

• CNF #2: If you think your childhood was weird, trust me, someone else submitted one that involved a haunted Roomba or a time-traveling gefilte fish.

• CNF lesson #3: If someone says “my family was normal,” there is a strong likelihood that the next paragraph will likely contain either a ghost, a chicken incident, or a mysterious curse.

• CNF lesson #4: Writers have a collective agreement that all childhood kitchens must contain at least one supernatural object and one person who makes soup with questionable intentions.

• CNF lesson #5: A memoirist will say “I am not a poet” right before delivering a sentence that is so poetic and musical, it knocks your socks off.

• CNF lesson #6: There are two kinds of memoirists: those who write about hiking as spiritual transformation, and those who simply cry in a Target parking lot. Both are valid.

But the biggest lesson was this: people are out there making astonishing work, and reading for a press forces you to reckon with what you yourself are writing. Not in a jealous way (okay, sometimes in a jealous way), but in an “oh right, I need to kick it up a notch or two” kind of way.

I learned about beginnings that grab you and how endings hit you right in the feels instead of sneaking out the back door. I learned how a voice feels consistent with the piece’s intentions. I learned that structure isn’t a prison and doesn’t need to be linear; it can be braided, fragmented, circular, mosaic, spiral, constellation-shaped—as long as it is intentional. I learned that creative nonfiction can be tender, feral, chaotic, and wise all at once, much like me, after reading submissions for six straight hours.

Most importantly, I had the privilege of witnessing writers putting their whole hearts on the page. You can’t read that much vulnerability without becoming a little more generous, a little more attentive, and, frankly, a little more terrified of ever submitting anything ever again.

So yes, being a reader for Trio House Press was a great honor and an even greater education.

Would I do it again? Absolutely! And I have already signed up for the next round of submissions.

But next time, I’m bringing a support raven, preferably one who understands enjambment.

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With less than one week to go before the 2026 AWP Conference in Baltimore, MD, we bring you a list of 20 fantastic Trio House authors who will be signing copies of their books at booth #1248. Keep reading to see when you can get a signed copy next week!

Thursday Signings (3/5)

Reuben Gelley Newman

Signing Dear Dear

2PM - 3PM

Susan L. Leary

Signing Dressing the Bear and More Flowers

2PM - 3PM

Lucille Lang Day

Signing The Cosmo and Me

3PM - 4PM

Friday Signings (3/6)

Renee Gilmore

Signing Wayfinding

10AM - 11AM

Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Signing Gold Passage and Interrupted Geographies

10AM - 11AM

Leila Farjami

Signing Daughter of Salt

11AM - 12PM

Mai-Linh Hong

Signing Continental Drift

11AM - 12PM

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann

Signing Lost Found Kept

12PM - 1PM

Elline Lipkin

Signing Girl in a Forest

12PM - 1PM

Emily Hyland

Signing My Wise Little Ghost

1PM - 2PM

Dylan Weir

Signing Public House

1PM - 2PM

Jason Prokowiew

Signing War Boys

2PM - 3PM

Leona Sevick

Signing The Bamboo Wife

2PM - 3PM

Samina Najmi

Signing Sing Me a Circle

3PM - 4PM

Kalehua Kim

Signing Mele

3PM - 4PM

Saturday Signings (3/7)

Martheaus Perkins

Signing The Grace of Black Mothers

11AM - 12PM

Rohin Blankenhorn

Signing Rooms for the Dead and the Not Dead Yet

1PM - 2PM

David Groff

Signing Live in Suspense and Clay

1PM - 3PM

Dorinda Wegener

Signing Four Fields

2PM - 3PM

Gauri Awasthi

Signing Mother Wound

2PM - 3PM

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Still figuring out your AWP Conference schedule? We'd love to see you at the following panels featuring our amazing authors! Keep reading to get to know the Trio House Press panelists who'll be speaking, and hear their advice to navigate the conference like a pro.

Issam Zineh

Mizna Presents: HUNA—Writing Resistance in the Now

To write resistively from the US is to reckon with many colonial presents: how imperialism abroad is connected to domestic oppression, how resisting fascism requires both urgency and slow thinking. As SWANA writers, how might disrupting normative Western expectations around craft and form, in turn, confront imperialism’s un/conscious? We explore how literature can invite interrogation of one’s positionality and confront present horrors, guiding us to a collective future beyond imperial domination.

Thursday 10:35 AM - 11:50 AM

Poetry at the Intersection of Science, Ethics & Care

This panel brings together poets who work in the sciences to explore how their practice shapes the ethical commitments and imaginative possibilities of their craft—particularly around embodiment, ethics, and care. Panelists reflect on writing within and against the systems they inhabit, how interdisciplinary thinking informs poetic precision and complexity, and what poetry reveals about the possibilities and limits of scientific understanding.

Saturday 10:35 AM - 11:50 AM

Issam Zineh’s AWP tip: AWP can be physically and emotionally taxing. If it’s your first time, don’t let FOMO overwhelm you. I’ve found it a richer experience to go to fewer panels than I originally set out.

Heid E. Erdrich

Shape-Shifting: Visions of Resurgence in Indigenous Art-Poetry

Five Indigenous writers highlight the dynamic shapes that empower Native poetry. From clay to camera; pictograph to performance; installations to experimental forms—Indigenous poets construct poetic models inspired by tribal epistemologies, models that sustain their community, knowledge, and sovereignty. Working in collaboration with or beyond the page, words are embodied, staged, touched, and reimagined to open possibilities for resurgence and remembrance. Forms and roles of poetry shape-shift.

Thursday 12:10 PM - 1:25 PM

Heid E. Erdrich’s AWP tip: Happy Hour is the least expensive meal of the day.

Tara Betts

Alternative Nation, or Whatever: Gen X Perspectives on the Writing Life

Generally understood as those born between 1965 and 1980, Generation X tends to be ignored or forgotten. When it’s not, it has often been derided and misunderstood by the much larger generations that flank it: baby boomers and millennials. In a media landscape where the dominant voices aren’t Generation X, what are the alternative perspectives that are missing? What does the Generation X experience tell us about the larger shifts in literary culture since the turn of the twenty-first century?

Thursday 12:10 PM - 1:25 PM

Offsite Events:

Friday, March 6th, 5:30 PM -7 PM: Fierce Female Formal Poets hosted by Annie Finch and Moira Egan at Ash Bar, 2E Read Street, Baltimore, MD.

Friday, March 6th, 6 PM-8 PM: “Where The Universe Is” at Mystique Barrel Brewing, 912 Washington Blvd., Baltimore, MD

Tara Betts’ AWP tip: Pick at least one non-AWP activity you want to do or one local place that you’d love to visit.

Davi Gray

LGBTQ Writers Caucus

The LGBTQ Writers Caucus provides a space for writers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer to network and discuss common issues and challenges, such as representation and visibility on and off the literary page, and how to incorporate one’s personal identity into their professional and academic lives. The caucus also strives to discuss, develop, and increase queer representation for future AWP conferences and serve as a supportive community and resource for its members.

Thursday 5 PM - 6:15 PM

What Davi Gray is looking forward to: being overwhelmed :D

Elline Lipkin

Words from the Deep, Dark Woods: Using Fairy Tales as Foil & Fuse

As cultural touchstones, fairy tales and myths provide fertile creative ground. Leveraging their known settings, characters, and story arcs, writers can slip into ekphrasis, persona, narrative, and more. This panel will offer examples and prompts from poets and prose writers of diverse cultural backgrounds who have used tales and myths to process grief; explore emigration and culture; and question gender, power, and neurodivergence, while using the familiar as a palimpsest to write something new.

Friday 9 AM - 10:15 AM

Elline Lipkin’s AWP tips: Carry your phone charger (or a battery pack) with you at all times. You can almost always find a plug in a conference room and recharge (literally) while you listen to a panel. Likewise, carry a leak-proof coffee travel mug (and water bottle if you can). By day two you’ll need to keep topping off and tanking up.

The afternoon of the last conference day is prime time to sweep through the book fair. Sales reps are literally giving books away that they don’t want to pack up and ship back. Deals spring up like wildfire and you can often negotiate for an even better one. The catch? You have to lug everything back. The other catch with waiting till the last day is that popular books will sell out. Another secret is that most publishers will let you fill out an order form and pay for the book at the AWP price (often discounted) and ship the book(s) to you for free. One year, in the slaphappy exhaustion of the last day’s closing hours, I recall one publisher (Sarabande?) started offering a shot of whiskey with every purchase.

Read more of Elline Lipkin’s tips here and here.

Leona Sevick

Foothills, Bays, and Freeways: Mid-Atlantic Poets

The Mid-Atlantic region is uniquely situated at the crossroads of culture, politics, and place. Poets offer perspectives on how the Mid-Atlantic, from the Susquehanna Valley to the Chesapeake Bay, has shaped their creative practices and read from work that showcases this influence.

Friday 12:10 PM - 1:25 PM

Leona Sevick’s AWP tip: Drink plenty of water! And take your time at the Book fair—you don’t need to do it all in one day.

Tamara J. Madison

Unearthed Verse: Lineage-Based Literary Projects as Critical Black Archive

Four Black women poets and scholars will share their explorations of their personal ancestral archives and genealogical research as inspiration and foundation for their writing. Panelists will read excerpts of their work and discuss the cultural, political, and spiritual influences of this work and its timeliness during this era of erasure and “anti-DEI” mandates.

Saturday 10:35 AM - 11:50 AM

Tamara J. Madison’s AWP tip: Don’t exhaust yourself! Read the schedule before arriving and be selective about what you want to attend. Leave room for pauses and decompression. It will most likely be intense.

Joe Osterhaus

River of Song: Joseph Harrison’s Collected Poems

Poets from John Ashbery to Richard Wilbur praised Baltimorean Joseph Harrison’s work, and he was senior American editor of Waywiser Press until his sudden death in 2024. Technically accomplished, his poetry is informed by a deep understanding of verse in English. On the publication of Harrison’s last book, Alan Shapiro referred to him as “one of American poetry’s best kept secrets.” In this event, poets and critics will break that secrecy by reading from and commenting upon his Collected Poems.

Saturday 10:35 AM - 11:50 AM

David Groff

More Than the Sum of Its Parts: Crafting & Revising Your Poetry Manuscript.

What makes a poetry manuscript more than a collection of recent work? Four poets and a poetryeditor discuss the craft of the full-length book, from structure and organization to thematic and narrative throughlines. How do you decide which poems belong, which to cut, and what’s missing? How do projects evolve over time? Panelists share insights from writing and publishing collections with presses big and small, also describing the role of peers, mentors, and editors in the revision process.

How can we bring our poems together to invite the reader on a journey, into a garden, through an argument, and so create the larger poetry of the book, while offering some resolution and repair? This event will explore that question, with much inspiration from THP publisher Kris Bigalk’s Substack essay “How to Order and Organize a Poetry Collection Manuscript.”

Saturday 12:10 PM - 1:25 PM

David Groff’s AWP tip: Your curiosity will carry you through.

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In response to the overwhelming ICE presence and murders of beloved community members Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, we have invited our authors and members of our literary community to share words, poems, and sentiments of solidarity. Here are some of their words.

Watch the full playlist here

Virginia poet Martheaus Perkins, author of The Grace of Black Mothers, shares a poem and his thoughts on the ICE occupation of Minneapolis. The Grace of Black Mothers is a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Literary Poetry.

National Book Award-winning poet from Washington state, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, shares her thoughts and care for the people of Minnesota, and also reads two poems, one from Kaan and Her Sisters and the title poem from Something About Living.

Massachusetts author Jason Prokowiew, winner of the 2025 Aurora Polaris Award for his father and son memoir/biography War Boys (July 2026); the book tells the story of Jason’s father’s wartime trauma as he experienced being orphaned in Belarus, and adopted by Nazis. This excerpt illustrates the importance of resistance in the face of fascism.

We thank everyone who has contributed to our virtual vigils, including:

• Dylan Weir

• Ana Maria Caballero

• Susan Azar Porterfield

• Dorinda Wegener

• Artress Bethany White

• Mai-Linh Hong

• David Groff

• Jessica Hincapie

• Samina Najmi

• Deborah Derrickson Kossmann

• Richard Terrill

• Matt Mauch

• Darren Demaree

• Renee Gilmore

• Elline Lipkin

• Iris Jamahl Dunkle

You can watch their videos on our Virtual Vigil Playlist here.

To learn how you can get involved in the effort to regain democracy (both in Minnesota and in your own state), read more about ICE OUT OF MN here.

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We’re thrilled to share a first look at Girl Gone Wild, the debut memoir from Courtney Kocak, forthcoming from Trio House Press on April 1.

Below you’ll find details about the book, cover reveal, early praise, and Courtney’s bio—everything you need to get a feel for this sharp, searching, fearless exploration of ambition, sexuality, and becoming oneself.

Pre-order Girl Gone Wild here!

To celebrate and learn more, please join us for a live conversation this Friday, January 23rd, at 2 pm CT, when Courtney will sit down with Trio House Press’s own Lili Gourley for an intimate interview about the making of Girl Gone Wild, the questions it wrestles with, and the journey from lived experience to the page.

We hope you’ll want to read along—and join us live.

Join the live Friday 1/23 @ 2pm CT!

GIRL GONE WILD

The Hollywood Misadventures of a Small-Town Girl

Tales of ambition, delusion, drugs, sex, and misogyny... including selling T-shirts on the Girls Gone Wild bus

GIRL GONE WILD is the memoir of an unruly metamorphosis from girl to woman. Author Courtney Kocak is an actress-turned-writer who transplanted herself from the quiet cornfields of rural Minnesota to the filthy heart of Hollywood in her painfully protracted quest to “make it” in a time before our lives were flattened by the internet—a longer, more arduous journey than she ever imagined, full of unexpected detours like falling in love with an abusive asshole and eventually having his abortion, a Model Mayhem photo shoot gone wrong, acting in independent films, a Craigslist massage for money, getting paid to kick a guy in the balls, getting hooked on Adderall, selling T-shirts on the Girls Gone Wild tour, and so much more.

GIRL GONE WILD is a collection of exploits and delusions about chasing your dreams with reckless abandon and what happens when their pursuit becomes a new kind of trap. In this memoir-in-essays, Kocak takes readers along on her heady metamorphosis from girl to woman and from dreamer to professional artist, as she is transformed in this unwitting feminist coming-of-age. It’s a wild, cringeworthy, and often heartbreaking tale, but with Kocak’s wry wit and clear-eyed accounting, it’s nothing short of captivating.

EARLY PRAISE:

“Girl Gone Wild is fiery, sparkly, spicy. It’s brash. It’s just—wild. It’s a fire sign on the page.”

—CHLOE CALDWELL, author of Women and Trying

“A riveting account told with irresistible vulnerability and mastery.”

—ANTONIA CRANE, author of Spent

“Nobody tells a story like Courtney Kocak... She has an exceptional ability to blend humor with the depth of human emotion.”

—BASSEY IKPI, New York Times bestselling author of I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying

“Courtney Kocak’s writing is fresh, funny, and unapologetically feminist—like hanging out with your smartest friend with the best stories.”

—HALLEY SUTTON, author of The Lady Upstairs and The Hurricane Blonde

COURTNEY KOCAK is a writer, podcaster, and comedian who splits time between Austin and Los Angeles. She wrote for Amazon’s Emmy-winning animated series Danger & Eggs and Netflix’s Know It All. She’s produced a slew of highly-ranked podcasts and currently hosts three of her own with over two million downloads to date: Private Parts Unknown, about love and sexuality around the world, The Bleeders, about book writing and publishing, and Podcast Bestie, a best friend to podcasters trying to grow and monetize their shows (and a popular Substack). As a writer, her bylines include The New York Times, The Washington Post, LA Times, Cosmopolitan, Slate, HuffPost, Business Insider, and more. Her debut memoir, Girl Gone Wild, with Trio House Press, is coming April 1, 2026!

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Read the full interview here!

Emily Hyland is a poet, mindful movement teacher, and restaurateur. Her first poetry collection, Divorced Business Partners: A Love Story, was the Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize Winner in 2024. Her new collection, My Wise Little Ghost, is forthcoming in July 2026. It delves into a complex experience of processing grief over a previous abortion as her sister’s pregnancy progresses. The poems give voice to these experiences and explore the profound journey of psychedelic therapy that brought them to the surface of consciousness.

In my conversations with Hyland, we discussed the origins of her own poetic voice as well as the ways that her yoga practice and work as a mindful movement teacher aids in her creative process.

Pre-order My Wise Little Ghost here!

Bridget Kriner: How did you come to poetry in your life? And as a reader or as a writer or both.

Emily Hyland: I came to poetry in Mrs. Berrian’s 7th grade English class. She did a chapbook unit during National Poetry Month, and I had the privilege of having her in 7th grade and 8th grade.

When my first book came out last year, I read in my hometown, and she came to the reading. That was really special. I hadn’t seen her since middle school. I was going through one of those horrible middle school friend group breakups where my best friends since I was a kid just decided to stop being friends with me. So, in her class, I got to write through it. It’s funny, my first published book is Divorced Business Partners, and I still have my chapbook; it’s called Best Friends with a broken best friend necklace on the cover, and it’s dedicated to this girl— “without you, these poems wouldn’t have come to be.”

Anyway, it was this amazing opening in my life where I got to take all of these hard feelings and put them out on the page. I’d always been interested—I’d always been good at writing. We had a reading at the end of the unit, and I got to stand in front of the class and read this heartbroken poem. I felt so empowered. That really was the key that unlocked this relationship with poetry as a means to express my feelings and my process around my feelings. I think that the way I write has remained close to that throughout my life.

BK: What about as a reader?

EH: Reading poetry came later, in college. I was in a BFA program at my undergraduate university, and my professor put The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds in my hands. That book started me reading poetry.

I was at Brooklyn College, where John Ashbery had been. So I read a lot of John Ashbery. It felt really confusing to me, but there was a foundation from reading a lot of him. More contemporarily, Mark Doty, Ellen Bass, and Marie Howe have become three prime figures that I really respect in terms of both who they are as poets in the world and who they are and how they are on the page. So they’ve had a really big impact.

When my mom died, I read Heaven’s Coast. Have you read that memoir by Mark Doty? It’s his memoir about shepherding his partner, Wally, through hospice when he died of AIDS. It’s so painful and beautiful. It was like a companion as I was annotating in the margins with things like, “Yes, I had that experience too.” I’d never been in such an intense hospice experience until that time with my mom, so the companionship that that book held for me, even before I knew Mark as a person, was enormous.

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BK: You’ve mentioned him a number of times in our work together, so I was always curious about how that relationship came to be because it’s always been clear how important he is in the poetry space for you.

EH: He’s kind of like my poetry dad.

One thing that came about was the sense that I’m done feeling “out of my depth.” In the creative environments that I’ve been creating for folks, a primary value is “this is a supportive, generative, nonjudgmental, all-are-welcome kind of space.” I think this is one of the reasons I’ve felt such kinship with Mark. When I went to the retreat with Ellen and Marie, it was the same thing—these are spaces of warmth, and there’s not a lick of competitiveness. It’s just about producing work and getting to know the poems.

You know I teach yoga, right? That’s the kind of environment I’m into. It doesn’t matter how flexible you are or what you can or can’t do. It’s about feeling safe in this room to get to explore what it means to be alive. And they [Mark, Ellen, and Marie] do the same thing in those writing spaces—create the circumstances for you to feel what it’s like to be alive and get some of those feelings into your poems.

BK: I’m glad you mentioned yoga, because that segues into my next question about pizza, yoga, and poetry. How do these passions work together in your life?

EH: I was in the restaurant business for about a decade in New York City, very unexpectedly. I had been writing and teaching yoga in my 20s, and then in my 30s, I was pulled into the sway of the restaurant world. And it was in the abyss of that world where all layers of my life fell apart, which in turn created the circumstances for poetry to emerge, and for yoga to emerge in a more meaningful way.

Being a restaurateur in New York City—with a concept that became wildly successful in a way I had never expected or anticipated—created the conditions, after the fact, for me to live in a space where writing poems, studying poetry, practicing and teaching yoga was possible. And from there, to create environments for other people to do this kind of work too.

I’ve been practicing yoga since I was 24. Back then, it was the first time in a very long time, I felt like— “Oh, I can do this. And I feel safe. And I don’t feel judged.” So that’s continued to develop. Now I actually own and operate a yoga studio here in Santa Fe. I’m just so grateful– because I love building community around feeling and breathing in your body and then getting to use that kind of space to feel and breathe in the heart of poems.

I teach yoga through the lens of poetry. I’ll bring a different collection each week to the studio and read from that collection over the course of the weekend.

BK: There is a strong connection between what you have said and my own experience of the work of somatic therapy, which is always pushing me to examine where I feel emotion in my physical body. Similarly, in the process of composing, often you’re revisiting experiences–and at times, because of how trauma responses can work, we can develop a distance from where and how our past experiences felt in our bodies.

EH: I feel like the poems are all right here. We can’t see all the strings of the universe around us, but that doesn’t mean they’re not here, just as the poems are here. When we open up our ability to see and feel, to open up that space, then we can receive them.

Pre-order My Wise Little Ghost here!

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Emily Hyland is a poet, mindful movement teacher, and restaurateur. Her first poetry collection, Divorced Business Partners: A Love Story, was the Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize Winner in 2024. Her new collection, My Wise Little Ghost, is forthcoming in July 2026. It delves into a complex experience of processing grief over a previous abortion as her sister’s pregnancy progresses. The poems give voice to these experiences and explore the profound journey of psychedelic therapy that brought them to the surface of consciousness.

In my conversations with Hyland, we discussed the origins of her own poetic voice as well as the ways that her yoga practice and work as a mindful movement teacher aids in her creative process.

Pre-order My Wise Little Ghost here!

Bridget Kriner: How did you come to poetry in your life? And as a reader or as a writer or both.

Emily Hyland: I came to poetry in Mrs. Berrian’s 7th grade English class. She did a chapbook unit during National Poetry Month, and I had the privilege of having her in 7th grade and 8th grade.

When my first book came out last year, I read in my hometown, and she came to the reading. That was really special. I hadn’t seen her since middle school. I was going through one of those horrible middle school friend group breakups where my best friends since I was a kid just decided to stop being friends with me. So, in her class, I got to write through it. It’s funny, my first published book is Divorced Business Partners, and I still have my chapbook; it’s called Best Friends with a broken best friend necklace on the cover, and it’s dedicated to this girl— “without you, these poems wouldn’t have come to be.”

Anyway, it was this amazing opening in my life where I got to take all of these hard feelings and put them out on the page. I’d always been interested—I’d always been good at writing. We had a reading at the end of the unit, and I got to stand in front of the class and read this heartbroken poem. I felt so empowered. That really was the key that unlocked this relationship with poetry as a means to express my feelings and my process around my feelings. I think that the way I write has remained close to that throughout my life.

BK: What about as a reader?

EH: Reading poetry came later, in college. I was in a BFA program at my undergraduate university, and my professor put The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds in my hands. That book started me reading poetry.

BK: That Sharon Olds collection was one of my favorites when I was an early college student, too! When I heard you say the title, I immediately thought about the poem, “Sex Without Love.” It’s a poem I have always loved.

EH: I could probably recite that right now.

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Trio House Press more than doubled its output in 2025, publishing two memoirs, one essay collection, and seven poetry collections. Here are some firsts, highlights, stats, and things to look forward to in the new year.

Trio House Firsts

• Published our first memoir, Lost Found Kept by Deborah Derrickson Kossmann

• Published our first poetry translation, Seeking You by Jeong Ho-Seung, translated by Brother Anthony of Taize.

• Exhibited at the American Library Association Conference in Philadelphia, the Decatur Book Festival, and the inaugural Bookfair for Grownups in St Paul, Minnesota.

• Announced first deals in Publisher’s Marketplace.

• Held our first Pizza Fundraiser through Pizza Loves Emily (Trio Pie, available in December 2025).

• First starred review in Library Journal for Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet by Rhoni Blankenhorn.

• First Book Page starred review for Lost Found Kept by Deborah Derrickson Kossmann.

• First Publisher’s Weekly starred review for creative nonfiction for Samina Najmi’s Sing Me a Circle.

• First featured book in Poets and Writers Magazine, Samina Najmi’s Sing Me a Circle, listed as a most anticipated fall creative nonfiction title (Sept/Oct 2025 issue).

• First author featured in online “10 Questions” series, Poets and Writers: Rhoni Blankenhorn.

2025 Highlights

• The Grace of Black Mothers by Martheaus Perkins was a finalist for the Maya Angelou Award, and was reviewed in Publishers Weekly, The Seattle Book Review, VerseCurious, Fish Barrell Review, and Mom Egg Review.

• Lost Found Kept by Deborah Derrickson Kossmann was named a Best Memoir of 2025 by Book Page, and interviews, mentions, and reviews appeared in many publications, including US News and World Report, Book Page, The Linden Review, and multiple podcasts.

• Mele by Kalehua Kim is featured in a Poets and Writers debut poets profile (Jan/Feb 2026). Interviews and reviews appeared in multiple outlets, including Booklist, Mom Egg Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

• Voice/Poems by Susan Azar Porterfield was reviewed in Great Lakes Review, Action, Spectacle, and other outlets.

• Splice by Anthony Borruso was reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, Tupelo Quarterly, Heavy Feather Review, and other publications.

• Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet by Rhoni Blankenhorn was featured in Rhino Poetry, The Cortland Review, Library Journal, and was listed as a summer favorite by Poetry Northwest

• Seeking You by Jeong Ho-seung, translated by Brother Anthony of Taize, was featured in the CLMP Reading List for Translation Month 2025 and was reviewed by London Korea Links.

• Girl in a Forest by Elline Lipkin is a finalist for the California Golden Poppy Award, was reviewed in Verseville, and was an Academy of American Poets featured fall title

• Wayfinding by Renee Gilmore has been reviewed in The Pioneer Press, Once Upon a Book, and was an October pick on Bookshop.org

• Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time by Samina Najmi was named a top memoir for 2025 by Debutiful and has been reviewed in multiple outlets, including River Teeth, Publishers Weekly, and Asiatic Magazine.

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2025 Stats

• Published seven debut authors.

• 1200+ total submissions received (contests, open reading, and agented).

• Signed 12 publishing deals for 2026-2027.

• Donations received for Giving Tuesday and Give to the Max Day: $2,500.

• Exhibited at five book festivals, including AWP and The Twin Cities Book Festival.

• Powered by 40+ volunteer readers, board members, marketers, videographers, and roadies, ten editorial and production paid consultants, and four paid staff members.

  Check out 2025 Trio House Titles

Forthcoming in 2026

• Acquisition of Red Dragonfly Press.

• Launch of new Scott King Prize, under the new Red Dragonfly imprint.

• Twelve new titles:

February 2026

• More Flowers by Susan L. Leary (poetry)

• Glassful of Prayer by Anthony Ceballos (poetry)

April 2026

• Girl Gone Wild by Courtney Kocak (memoir)

May 2026

• Material by Ana Maria Caballero (poetry)

July 2026

• War Boys by Jason Prokowiew (memoir)

• Continental Drift by Mai-Linh Hong (poetry)

• Dear Dear by Reuben Gelley Newman (poetry)

• Daughter of Salt by Leila Farjami (poetry)

• My Wise Little Ghost by Emily Hyland (poetry)

October 2026

• Mother Wound by Gauri Awasthi (poetry)

• The Cosmos and Me: New and Collected Poems by Lucille Lang Day (poetry)

• Public House by Dylan Weir (poetry)

Pre-order 2025 titles here!

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Read the full interview here!

Susan L. Leary’s More Flowers is her fifth published poetry collection and second publication with Trio House Press. The book is a declaration of resilience in the face of perpetual adversity against girls and women alike. Lili Gourley, Supporting Editor at Trio House Press, had the opportunity to talk with Susan about this new, exciting collection.

Pre-order More Flowers Here!

Lili Gourley: More Flowers is an internal and external exploration of womanhood in its many facets, and at this point, seems more necessary than ever. Can you tell us about your process for writing this book and your mindset while putting these poems to paper?

Susan L. Leary: More Flowers was initially written as my MFA thesis, but my work on these poems was interrupted when my brother, Brian, died, at which point I began working obsessively on Dressing the Bear. During this time, I also moved from Miami, FL, my home of over 20 years, to Indianapolis, IN, so it was a period of great emotional and physical upheaval. In a sense, two very different versions of myself wrote More Flowers, my pre- and post-grief selves. I also do not like anything to go to waste, be it a scrap of fabric or morsel of food. My Nana taught me that, so when I finished Dressing the Bear, I knew I wanted to return to these poems, dust them off and bring More Flowers to completion. When I speak of girlhood or womanhood, I am using these terms to hold a broader, more intense narrative of criticism I experienced most of my life, particularly as it relates to the body and the voice. I have never fully belonged either, and the experience of being a girl is the closest approximation to belonging I can achieve.

LG: Your work is often inspired by familial relationships and how they have shaped you. This collection specifically looks at mother-daughter. Can you talk about the experience of writing about such relationships? How did writing about them affect how you saw them?

SL: Family is the stage upon which everything plays out, and my family members are the most important people in my life, so it feels natural to write about them. A difficult fact, however, is that each child inherits the world of her guardians. In my case, I entered a world governed by the rules, conditions, and emotional temperature set by my mother, and my agency was tied to how well I navigated that environment. But, in writing these poems, I realized a mother and daughter can co-create their shared existence if the mother provides that opportunity, which mine did, and that, to me, is love. Of course, family is hard. One of its greatest complications is the way a child’s perspective can be silenced and invalidated by those she loves despite every effort to be heard. I have the rare gift of a mother who listened, who expressed genuine regret and incredible self-awareness when I showed her my wounds. I reference this aspect of our relationship in the poem, “Now That My Mother Has Apologized,” which is one of the most meaningful poems of the collection to me and one I return to often. With each read, I am reminded a daughter has a voice at the table and not just on the page.

LG: Dressing the Bear, winner of the 2023 Louise Bogan Award, was a heartfelt and devastating ode to your late brother. How did the writing process differ from the elegiac style of writing about a loved one to a more forceful conversation on the internal and external struggles of womanhood?

SL: There are two facts that rub up against each other in my response to this question. One the worst thing that has happened to me in my life is my brother dying, and two, the most difficult thing for me to do in my life is talk about myself. When my brother died, I wanted to write about him. In fact, I couldn’t not write about him, and I leaned readily, and obsessively, into grief. You aptly notice that the poems of More Flowers are “more forceful” because I must genuinely exert myself to communicate the material of my deeper emotional recesses on the page. As unsophisticated as it sounds, it is really, really hard, sometimes impossible, and in thinking about it further, that elegy is less rigorous for me than self-talk; well, I am not sure if that is absolutely wild or to be expected. What, also, might it mean that the tragic and painfully troubling circumstances of our lives are a worse enemy to confront than death? I do not wish to know.

LG: More Flowers reckons with both “gods” and capital-G “God.” You even write that “...our mothers are the only real gods…” Why was this meditation with higher powers (positive or negative) important for this collection?

SL: This is a very difficult question. I was raised Catholic, and while I no longer regularly attend Mass, I still believe heavily in the spiritual aspects of existence, so when I reference capital-G “God,” I imagine him to be kind, patient, and well-meaning. On the other hand, my use of “gods” is suggestive of a self-serving, more manufactured power, often a stand-in for men, the patriarchy, and the infinite obstacles meant to stifle girls and women. Throughout the collection, I am walking that fine line between power and love, thinking extensively about how these two conditions dictate my ability to, again, belong, be made visible, and affirmed. In a perfect world, it is something like this: you always want to be in God’s favor but not because God is more powerful than you, but because God loves you.

LG: How did you decide the title More Flowers? Did the title or the poem “In Lieu of Flowers, More Flowers” come first?

SL: About eight years ago, during the first semester of my MFA, we were asked to write a love poem to ourselves, a prompt that resulted in my poem, “Instructions for Childless Woman upon Burial, or Love Poem to Self,” which also contained the line, “in lieu of flowers, more flowers,” an image and a concept I was quite enamored with at the time. I love flowers. They are beautiful, and they are like us, most alive in the process of their dying. They hang on as long as they can, too. Their strength is their fragility, and their fragility is their strength. Naturally, I was compelled to borrow this line for the title of my MFA thesis, and years later, I returned to it again, writing a poem with the line as its title, which is the poem that appears in this collection.

“In lieu of flowers, more flowers” has become a constant, stable, relentless bit of language in my life, and I am grateful it refuses to abandon me. Funny enough, I had originally planned to title this manuscript after another poem, “Encore to Girlmaking,” but then Kris Bigalk, executive director of Trio House Press and my editor, suggested More Flowers, and the moment she shared it, I knew it was perfect. I thank her for that. I should add that as I’ve gotten older, I realize death is creeping closer and closer to me, a fact I do not like. As cruel, devastating, unjust and ugly as the world can be, it is also wonderful, and I never want this to end—whatever all this really is—so I am constantly glomming on to this concept of more, more, more and that desire, or obsession, with excess really informs this book.

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LG: What is your favorite poem in this collection, one that you’re particularly proud of or satisfied with?

SL: “Strawberry Season” immediately comes to mind. It is a love poem to my mother, through which I position her as a creator, someone who shapes my world through subtle, everyday acts of care and wisdom and fierce, subversive brutality. My mother is an absolute beast—I say this as sincerely, intimately, and aspirationally as I can—and I love her for it. She is sharply articulate and impossibly psychic in her perceptions, too, seeing the world unfold before it does, cautiously and dramatically pointing things out to me, saying here—look. My mother has never failed to remind me that in my most defeated and devastatingly fragile moments, I am still alive, and that my enemies, real or imagined, will fall first. Formally, “Strawberry Season” is also my take on the sonnet. Here, I use associative leaps, fragmented syntax, and lyrical compression to build intensity, the “turn” arriving through a dramatic shift in tone and slipping, finally, into a couplet of gratitude and marvel: “Thank god for my mother, / her minor invention of language. Only a man’s truth shudders / at the feet of lions. Not all animals go somewhere to die.” As an aside, this poem was originally published in The Arkansas International, one of the literary journals I admire most, and later translated into Italian for Detonatore Magazine by Matteo Fais, a beautifully kind and surprising honor.

LG: Who are the poets or artists that have helped shape you as a writer?

SL: Cynthia Marie Hoffman, who offered a brilliant and generous blurb for More Flowers, writes fearlessly about the self in ways I can only imagine, and in so many of her poems, surreal language shimmers into experience that is hauntingly, and exquisitely, real to me. Also, Chelsea Dingman, who interrogates family dynamics, geography, and the female body with the most striking, innovative sequences of images. I truly believe there is no one writing like her today, and I find her work to be beautifully, and bravely, torrential. I never stop returning to Mark Irwin’s poems either, particularly those of his collection, Tall If, because he is always reaching towards the spiritual, the life beyond this life or, perhaps, the one mysteriously inside it.

LG: What are you working on now?

SL: I talk about this often, so please forgive me for repeating myself. Currently, I am at work on a chapbook length manuscript of response poems to the daily journal entries my brother penned while in county jail during the summer of 2020 for addiction-related offenses. He kept this journal with the hope I would write an accompanying poem for each entry, and we planned to publish our work together. Though the world told him otherwise, he believed his voice mattered, and so did I. His death, just eight days after his release, has since given our project deeper, more heartfelt significance. I enjoy working with my brother’s text and commingling our perspectives, but it can be painfully difficult. Part ekphrastic, part documentary poetics, part social justice project, and part collaboration, my goals are to: challenge the dehumanization of the carceral state; interrogate the experience of the pandemic in the jail system; explore poetry’s potential for empathy and activism; and honor the love that exists, and always will exist, between me and my brother.

LG: What do you hope your readers get out of reading More Flowers?

SL: I hope when readers engage with these poems they encounter a new way of looking at themselves they haven’t yet considered. I hope they believe more fervently it is good to be seen, and I hope there is an idea that wows them. I especially wish for them more flowers.

Pre-order More Flowers Here!

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