I adore River Teeth, which publishes some of my favorite nonfiction being written today. And I especially love “Beautiful Things,” the journal’s weekly column featuring flash nonfiction pieces under 250. So, it was a real thrill to have a tiny essay titled “Brood” accepted for “Beautiful Things.” If you’re interested, you can read it here. […]
»MoreWhen I was a child, I believed that we had a day off from school on Veterans Day because this was also my birthday. But, now, as an adult, this day has a different meaning, because my husband is a veteran. I’ve written extensively about his service in my books, Stateside (2010) and Dots & […]
»MoreEven though 2022 still feels very far away, my second book of creative nonfiction, Taste: A Book of Small Bites, is now available for pre-order at Columbia University Press! You can find information about the book here. And, if you decide to purchase a copy of the book, using the discount code “CUP20” in the […]
»MoreIt’s hard to keep track of time these days. It amazes me to think that, barely a year ago, I began working on an interdisciplinary project called Taste: A Book of Small Parts. Divided into five sections–the sweet, the salty, the sour, the bitter, and the umami–Taste is comprised of dozens of tiny essays, each […]
»MoreI’m thrilled to have a new essay in West Branch, one of my very favorite literary journals. “You Must Stumble” is part of my manuscript-in-progress, Exhibitions, a book of essays about my nomadic upbringing as the daughter of two American diplomats. Most of the pieces in Exhibitions examine works of art–paintings, art glass, photographs–as a […]
»MoreI’m thrilled to have a poem from my latest collection, Wild Kingdom, appear today on Poetry Daily. “Portrait of an Administrator with Strategic Plan and Office Supplies” is one of many portraits that appear in the book: clear-eyed, precise sketches of the difficult, discomfiting characters who often populate the thorny landscape of academia. You can […]
»MoreI am always extremely grateful to have poems featured in the syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry, which was started by my mentor and former teacher, Ted Kooser, and has now been taken over by poet Kwame Dawes. This time, the poem is “[Sometimes we wonder what unfailing means],” the first sonnet in a […]
»MoreThe Colorado Review is one of my favorite literary journals. A while back, they published one of my essays about art from a nonfiction book project, Exhibitions. The piece was called “Portrait on Metal with Patterned Scarf and Streak of Light” and was later named as a notable essay in Best American Essays. So, it […]
»MoreFor many months now, I’ve been working on a nonfiction manuscript, Taste: A Book of Small Bites. The book looks at the sweet, the sour, the bitter, the salty, and umami through an interdisciplinary lens, considering the ways that taste informs poetry and fiction, theater, film, opera, philosophy, and religion. Taste is comprised of shorter […]
»MoreRecently, as a way of commemorating Memorial Day, poet Richard Blanco read and discussed one of my poems (along with pieces by Yusef Komunyakaa and Bruce Weigl!)–on Boston Public Radio. “Before the Deployment” comes from my third collection, Stateside, which was published by Northwestern University Press in 2010. Stateside looks at the before, during, and […]
»MoreRecently, I wrote a brief essay–“Toward a Campus Poetics”–about the campus novels I read when working on my latest poetry collection, Wild Kingdom. I’ve always loved this sub-genre of literary fiction and really enjoyed talking about how these books informed my own book. You can read the piece here.
»MoreRecently, I learned that “Fairy Tale with Laryngitis and Resignation Letter,” a poem from my ninth book of poetry, Wild Kingdom, was listed as an approved text for Poetry Out Loud, the national poetry recitation competition. And only today I learned that a South Dakota senior, Rahele Megosha, who was named the 2021 Poetry Out […]
»MoreA few months ago, poet and editor Sarah Lao, interviewed me for EX/POST, a literary magazine run by a truly impressive group of high school students and undergraduates. I was so grateful to have the chance to talk with Sarah and to answer her wonderful questions. You can read the interview here.
»MoreI’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 […]
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