On the best of news
On August 20, I received a phone call from The University of Utah Press with the most amazing news. My manuscript Catechesis: a postpastoral was chosen for the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize by Kimiko Hahn. My debut poetry collection will be published by U of U Press in June 2019. This past month has been the most wonderfully surreal one of my life. I've been working on my U of U Press author questionnaire with things like cover art ideas, names of writers to ask for blurbs, and drafting some promotional copy for the book. The latter was quite a challenge — thinking about my own work from the outside, as a reader and a marketer. But it ended up being a pretty fun exercise. I feel like I have a better understanding of my own work now; and I'm better able to explain what my work is "about": If Clarice Starling and Ellen Ripley could warn the girls and women to follow, what would they tell us? “A girl has two choices: / to be a tree or / to be the forest.” C