I’m thrilled to have another hybrid book review up today at the Brevity blog. This one is a review in the form of an abecedarian about Kate Lebo’s The Book of Difficult Fruit, which also happens to be an abecedarian! As you can imagine, the review was really fun to write. You can read the […]
»MoreAppearing throughout Wild Kingdom is a sequence of persona poems spoken in the voices of different birds found on the Eastern Shore of Maryland: Sanderlings, Northern Cardinals, Blue-Winged Teals, Mallards, and Osprey. One of those bird poems recently appeared in the literary journal, River Styx, and was just been republished on Verse Daily. It’s a […]
»MoreWorking on my latest collections of essays, Exhibitions, I realized that I wanted to write a piece that would be accessible, suitable to read at literary events, but also representative of the book’s concern with the decorative and fine arts. With these ideas in mind, I began to write an essay about a cherished object […]
»MoreAn ekphrastic poem from my manuscript-in-progress, Civilians, is now up at Consequence, a literary journal dedicated to “focusing on the realities and effects of war and geopolitical violence.” Civilians will be the third book in my military spouse trilogy of poetry collections, which I began with Stateside in 2010 and followed up with Dots & […]
»MoreIn August of 2020, I began working on new book of nonfiction, Taste: A Book of Small Bites. The project looks at the sweet, the sour, the bitter, the salty, and umami through a number of shorter and flash essays, the different tastes rubbing against one another in a way that I hope will be […]
»MoreDuring the summer of 2020, I started work on a second MFA (this one in creative nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts). Over the fall semester, I wrote a book review for each of the monthly “packets” that I submitted to my faculty advisor. It turned out to be a great opportunity to […]
»MoreAs I’ve mentioned previously, I began earning a second MFA (this one in creative nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts) during the summer of 2020. Over the fall, I wrote a number of book reviews, as part of the monthly “packets” that I submitted to my faculty advisor. Well, I’m thrilled to now […]
»MoreWild Kingdom is out today. When I think about the eight other poetry collections I’ve written and seen to publication, it’s clear to me that Wild Kingdom had a journey entirely its own: one that began with pain and personal trauma. As a result, the early days of working on the book were challenging, because […]
»MoreMy next poetry collection, Wild Kingdom, comes out near the end of February. And, just under the wire, four of the poems from the collection have been published in the latest issue of Court Green. You can read them here. Stay tuned for more information and news about Wild Kingdom!
»MoreOver the summer, I began a new adventure. I started to earn a second MFA, this one in creative nonfiction from the Vermont College in Fine Arts! It’s a low-residency program, which means that most of the degree is earned long-distance. Each semester, students are paired with faculty advisors. The semester begins with a campus […]
»MoreI received really nice news today. It turns out that one of my essays, which appeared last year in The Colorado Review, was selected as one of the “Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2019” for The Best American Essays 2020. I was really excited for this little piece of nice news, because I love […]
»MoreI love Ted Kooser’s weekly newspaper column American Life in Poetry. Ted was my teacher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and he remains an important mentor. Ted never fails to remind me that it’s the work that matters, that each day we apprentice ourselves to language, dedicating ourselves to the craft of poetry and to […]
»MoreToday, I received my contributor’s copies of one of my very favorite literary journals, Copper Nickel, which operates out of the University of Colorado Denver; one of my poems appears in the current issue. “A War Is Forever” is a companion piece to a poem that recently appeared in The New England Review, “What Do […]
»MoreWell, after a delay of many, many months, my new poetry collection is finally out in the world. Published by the Evansville Press at the University of Evansville, Simple Machines was selected by Ned Balbo as as the 2019 winner of the Richard Wilbur Poetry Prize. The book is probably my most formal collection to […]
»MoreI submitted work to The Southern Review for nearly ten years before I received my first acceptance (for poems that later appeared in my fifth book, The Arranged Marriage). And it still remains a thrill to have my words published by a journal I so love and admire. I’m delighted to have a poem, “Norfolk, […]
»MoreI woke up this morning to the very surprising news that my first book of nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes, won the 2020 Firecracker Award in creative nonfiction from CLMP, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. Of course, I’m thrilled. I ventured into writing nonfiction so tentatively five years ago, and throughsmoke was […]
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