I am excited to announce that I’ve launched a new column on Channillo called Everything She’s Not. It’s a feminist pop culture column focused on representations of femme-identified characters and artists that defy expectations and shatter stereotypes. I’ve always been a little obsessed with zeitgeist (lowercase) and cultural consciousness, the ways our media and stories […]

      blud Rachel McKibbens Copper Canyon Press, 2017 Amazon       I first encountered Rachel McKibbens speaking at an AWP panel on “Poetry as Invocation” with Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Airea D. Matthews, Ada Limón, and Casey Rochteau. The poets read their work and discussed “the poetic impulses of women as a magical or […]

Today has been so strangely pleasant. I’m sure things like this only ever happen in the spring (or late winter). My sinuses are still clearing after 4 days of awful congestion, so I feel a bit like a slimy, cowlicked chick fresh out of the egg. I had some time to kill in between jobs so […]

coalesce, n: to grow together or into one body (Dictionary.com) In my quest to make a career out of writing, I have been working very hard lately to crack my own productivity secrets: How can I make time for my creative writing in addition to the hours of work it takes to find paid writing work and complete those projects as well? […]

The newest item on the list of strange things I’ve tried in order to get writing? Recording my own voice on my portable cassette player. The idea behind this experiment was to get a more extemporaneous, in-the-moment record of the particular thoughts I was having that night rather than sifting through ideas in my head […]

The act of writing has this fascinating quality: it seems so incredibly simple, putting words to paper, but its powers and nuances expose themselves the more we tinker, and they teach us how complicated we are. I am in about the fourth week of the poetry MFA program at Columbia College Chicago, and each week as I […]

How do I begin to talk about my experience in Minneapolis? First I should mention my excellent traveling companions THE NICKS (Ramsey and Demske), who put up with my mood swings and did the best they could with Google Maps–goofy rap ciphers notwithstanding. Next I should say we had a fantastic host family who trusted […]