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Showing posts from December, 2017

2017: the best of a bad year

This has been a stressful, overwhelming, and horrifying year for most of us as we stare daily into the void of the pre-apocalypse. Although keeping calm hasn't been an option, we have been carrying on. So, reflecting on everything I've accomplished in my writing life this year has been a welcome boost. I finished writing my first full-length poetry manuscript Catechesis: a postpastoral , and I've begun sending it to small press open reading periods and contests.  My second chapbook Blackbird Whitetail Redhand  was accepted for publication at Porkbelly Press and it is in production right now .  I had new Alien  poems accepted in Passages North and The Account , two journals that I admire.  My first visual poems were accepted for publication. These five pieces will appear in an upcoming issue of Duende .  So despite all of the terribly traumatic global goings-on, 2017 has been a huge writing year for me. My writing goals for 2018 are not modest, but they are fairly

On letterpress love and chapbook covers

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My new chapbook Blackbird Whitetail Redhand  is getting a letterpress cover and I am just thrilled! One of my favorite parts of my job at the Rose O'Neill Literary House is getting to create designs for and print letterpress broadsides of other writers' work. Because of my (very happy) time served as letterpress-bridesmaid, it really is so personally meaningful and exciting to be the recipient of the letterpress treatment for the very first time.  Nicci Mechler — editor, book designer, artist, and printer extraordinaire at  Porkbelly Press — put together this typographical design for my chapbook cover using varying fonts and faces of wood type — some even hand-carved.  You can see the creatively-arranged Tetris-like lock-up in the type bed at Tiger Lily Press below. What fun!  It will always be such an honor to have another artist render a visual impression of my textual work. This black and white, letterpress cover is the pitch-perfect opening into my new chapbo