Category Archives: Interview

Interview with an Accents-published author, or someone else we want you to hear from.

B. Elizabeth Beck and Swan Songs

Tell us the story of your Accents Publishing book, Swan Songs.

Swan Songs was originally a braided manuscript, weaving poetry and stories. I submitted it to Katerina, who liked the stories to stand alone. She and I worked to edit and polish the stories for publication. In the meanwhile, I submitted the poems to Rabbit House Press, who published them in a collection called Dancing on the Page. I feel very fortunate both publishers trusted my work and did such a wonderful job with the books.

What do you like most about it?

Swan Songs is a feminist collection. The stories detail women’s relationships with themselves and others and are political in nature. Each story is framed by a musical artist. The stories are not about the artists, they work as a framing structure and extended metaphor. It was such a delight to research the music to write the stories.

What did you have to overcome in order to finish and publish a book?

Managing time and committing to a manuscript takes dedication. My books evolve over years. Some were written within months, but the editing process takes years, careful consideration, and excellent editors like Katerina Stoykova to be ready to land in readers’ hands.

What do you hope people learn/receive/experience from reading your book?

I hope that women readers experience that nod of recognition in the authenticity of the stories. I hope that music fans enjoy the way I weave music within the text. And I expect that Phish fans find the Easter Eggs in the collection.

What was your favorite interaction with a reader and/or a fan?

I always feel honored when readers send/post reader pictures. What a delight to see my books in the world.


What are you working on now? Catch us up one significant event in your life since the publication of Swan Songs.

I am working on a collection of essays about cooking. I’m in the research phase, offering a writing workshop at the Carnegie Center this spring called: Culinary Love Letter to inspire me to shape my essays with recipes. I’m not sure where it is going, but I’m enjoying the process. I’m still engaged in Ekphrastic Writing and am excited to offer  Ekphrastic workshops in January through Accents Publishing and the Carnegie Center as well as workshops offered through the Kentucky Humanities Speakers Bureau.

Optional bonus question: Is there anything you want to get off your chest about writing or publishing?

The publishing world can be demoralizing so connecting with a writing community is very important. I’m so proud of my monthly poetry series, Poetry at the Table at Kenwick Table. 2026 marks the third year of this series and the community that has developed is incredibly valuable to me. I am proud to report that I have all the features booked for 2026 and can’t wait to meet each month for the inspiration the series provides.

Jeremy Paden and How to Recognize God’s Chosen

Tell us the story of your Accents Publishing book, How to Recognize God’s Chosen.

What do you like most about it?

Honestly, it is hard for me to say what I like. In fact, I tend to focus on the things I don’t like, regardless of what it is that I make. Few are the dinners where I don’t lead with a set of criticisms or a list of things I would change the next time I make it. I think somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that modesty turns away from the self. And so I have overcompensated. But, in an effort to answer the question, the collection was conceived as a long fragmented poem and the fragments to speak to each other across the collection and the collection builds on itself through foreshadowing and repetition. The collection values uncertainty over certainty. Indeed, the harshest criticism is reserved for those who are certain and who in their certainty are blind. And so with individual moments. For example, fire, stone, water, seed, and other elemental things appear and reappear throughout the collection and rarely are just one thing. Even the final denouement both resolves a good number of the tensions that run through the book and still opens up to mystery rather than answers. 

What did you have to overcome in order to finish and publish a book?

There are mundane things like editing individual poems, like the sequencing of poems and then the editing of poems again once the collection is arranged into a book. These are things you have to learn by doing, by reading, and then by arranging and rearranging. And they are challenges that you must face in order to arrive at a book that might get published. And those are all real challenges. And maybe others have tricks that they use to check the readiness. But, I never have. There is something in me that sees those and runs the other way from them. This is not to say that my approach is right. It’s probably not at all, and it is certainly not as efficient. But the thing I have had to overcome and I have to overcome it with every book is a persistent self-doubt. There is, of course, the doubt that accompanies all writing, but then there is another when it comes to publishing. 

Twelve years ago Katerina published my first chapbook, Broken Tulips. Three years after that Broadstone published my second chapbook, ruina montium. My first full-length collection and fourth over-all book, world as sacred burning heart, was published by 3: A Taos Press in 2021. That same year Valparaíso Ediciones, a Spanish publishing house, published Self-Portrait as an Iguana, a bilingual collection of poems that I wrote in Spanish and translated into English after co-winning a publication prize contest. Almost every single book I have published, including how to recognize god’s chosen, has made several rounds of open-reading periods and contests before finding a home. That means countless nos before the yes. In this sense it’s not different from most everybody.  

But I think that when we look at others we see their list of accomplishments and we don’t look at the struggle and the self-doubt that stands behind each and everyone of their published books. That self-doubt shows up in many ways: wonder about one poem or another, about the arrangement, about subject matter.

What do you hope people learn/receive/experience from reading your book?

I wanted to speak a word of peace, a word of love, a word of mercy in a time when it seems that we prefer to speak our bitterness and our grievances. That said, there is a thread in this collection that is critical, critical of the hypocrisies that often seem to attend those who claim they are pious, those who readily claim to be among God’s chosen and who in their self-certainty exclude others. Still, what I wanted to say is that we are all beloved, all of us have been chosen.

What was your favorite interaction with a reader and/or a fan?

At the Kentucky Book Festival a reader came for me to sign a book she had already purchased, as we chatted, she opened it up and I saw the collection was underlined, highlighted, and glossed. Seeing that in itself was an amazing compliment. But, she wanted to read to me her favorite section, and as she did she teared up. There were a handful of lines that spoke to her deeply in her current season of life. That anything I write would move someone is humbling. Another favorite was when my wife told me that she felt that I had a different relationship to these poems than to anything else I’ve ever written. 

What are you working on now? Catch us up one significant event in your life since the publication of How to Recognize God’s Chosen.

I always have three or four projects going on at one time. Or, at least that has been the case for about the past 15 years. I think there are a couple of reasons for this. First, I understand books as coherent projects rather than receptacles of poems written. Second, I write poems in both English and Spanish. And third, because I am nobody. Being nobody means that a collection of poems of mine once written can take a while to find a home. I don’t lament that in the least. That lag time lets me put the poems down, forget about them, pull them out and tinker with them. For example, how to recognize god’s chosen was shortlisted for a chapbook prize with Tupelo Press in 2018. When I heard back no, I sent it out a few more times and then sat on it for a few years. In the intervening years between 2018 and 2024, when Katerina picked it up, I ended up expanding the chapbook into a full-length. During that time I wasn’t just tinkering and waiting for those poems to find a home. I was writing other poems as well. In fact, in 2020 I published Under the Ocelot Sun with Shadelandhouse Modern Press, a bilingual, illustrated children’s book (that I wrote in 2019), and in 2021 I was fortunate to publish two books: world as sacred burning heart with 3: A Taos Press (a book that I had been writing for about 10 years) and Self-Portrait as an Iguana with Valparaíso Ediciones (a book that has poems that were first drafted in 2000). Self-portrait, while a bilingual collection, was mostly written in Spanish. 

So, right now, I have a collection of poems in English and another one in Spanish, as well as several translation projects underway. Plus, I am waiting for a book of poems in Spanish to be published and I am also waiting on the illustrations for a bilingual Abecedarian Bestiary of Central America to be finished so it can go to press. Had things gone according to my plans and what I had been told, both the Spanish collection and the bestiary would be published. But, that is the other thing about publishing, nothing works on your timeline. Patience is a necessary virtue. 

Karen Schubert and The Compost Reader

Tell us the story of your Accents Publishing book, The Compost Reader.

The first iteration of this manuscript was my MFA thesis, with the working title In This Light. I sent it out to a round of contests, and later exchanged manuscripts with some poets I admire. Barbara Sabol, such a generous and astute reader, noted that the “I”; in the manuscript made shifts that were disorienting. I re-edited the collection, rewriting some poems in 3rd person. Where characters recur, I arranged poems in chronological order and infilled with non-biographical poems.

Meanwhile, my concept chapbook manuscript I Left My Wings on a Chair won the Wick Poetry Center chapbook prize, and that led me to believe that surreal prose poems were a strong suit. Left to my own devices, my poems are oh so earnest, very sigh, and I think it was a memetic workshop in grad school that led me to the joy of trying out many voices, getting at an idea by building a weird world around it. I love the work of Mark Levine, Nin Andrews, Mathias Svalina, so many. I rearranged the manuscript again and centered those poems. For example the title poem, “The Compost Reader”; imagines a professional seer you can hire who will open your compost bin and tell you deep truths about yourself. Gah, so fun to write.

I sent the manuscript out again and was finalist at presses I wildly admire like The Word Works and Two Sylvias Press, what a thrill. Meanwhile, I reconnected with Katerina, whom I met some years ago at AWP, and she asked me what I was working on. I sent the manuscript to her and was over the moon when she said yes. I love Accents Publishing and the important work Katerina is doing in contemporary letters.

Surreally, the book came out during the pandemic lockdown, and that led me to realize there was a need for an online reading series for new books that were coming out in that moment. So with Nin Andrews, Lit Youngstown ran the New Book News series, readings that are archived on Lit Youngstown’s YouTube channel. What an honor, and I have since been able to invite some of those amazing authors to Youngstown.

What do you like most about it?

What I like most, from this vantage, is that the manuscript was not accepted until it had a more completed shape and narrative arc. I don’t remember who calls this editing in public, something like that. Not my intention. Each time I sent it out, it seemed finished, but somehow, when an editor doesn’t select a poem or manuscript, I can see it in a fresh way. Katerina as an editor has a sharp eye and made terrific suggestions, and I also found a few sloshy spots and she was generous about allowing me to continue making changes right up to the final final final. That was what I was really hoping for with my first book, that I’d find an editor who really cared about the work.

And allowing me to select my cover artwork was absolute joyful gravy. I had been in residence at the Vermont Studio Center with the stunningly talented printmaker Mary Gordon McFall, and Mary graciously said yes to her artwork on the cover. I love the rich ground of the image, and it’s no surprise Mary lives on the Kansas prairie and brings an eye to the depth of growth and regrowth.

What did you have to overcome in order to finish and publish a book?

The years I spent editing and submitting I was teaching as an adjunct and then working in cafés while building Lit Youngstown, so a submission fee represented a substantial expense. I would budget one submission fee per paycheck. And the around-the-clock nature of teaching and non-profit administration makes it hard to set aside quiet head space for the work of writing.

What do you hope people learn/receive/experience from reading your book?

Life is such a wild ride, I hope someone reading my book spends a moment in their own wild ride stories, and in that way of fellow travelers, we connect.

What was your favorite interaction with a reader and/or a fan?

I was invited onto an AWP panel of first book publishing over the age of 50. I was floored when, after the panel, there was a line of people waiting to talk to me, and they bought all of the books I brought. I love that inclusive nature of writing, the way experience and perspective serve us, rather than sideline us, those who are lucky enough to have more years to live and write.

What are you working on now? Catch us up one significant event in your life since the publication of The Compost Reader.

I am working with some artists on a new initiative, LOOP Youngstown Arts + Culture, and we are under contract for a building! In addition to dozens of artist studios and support for artists, there will be space for arts nonprofits like Lit Youngstown to work and grow in an arts-rich environment. These kinds of centers are happening everywhere, but this will be Youngstown’s first, and I’m chuffed.

Optional bonus question: Is there anything you want to get off your chest about writing or publishing?

Occasionally I’ll hear someone say that no one reads any more and wow, that’s not what I see. In 10 years, Lit Youngstown has hosted thousands of writers and people who may not consider themselves writers, who spent time with us engaged in and sharing creative work. I love this literary community, how expansive the curiosity. We’re wired to feel heard, and I’m here for it.

Brandel France de Bravo and MOTHER, LOOSE

Headshot of Brandel France de Bravo

What do you like most about MOTHER, LOOSE?

I like its cohesion—the combination of poems inspired Mother Goose rhymes with poems about the death of my mother.

What did you have to overcome to publish it?

The poems in Mother, Loose were part of a larger manuscript that ultimately did not cohere. I, consequently, decided to pare down the full-length manuscript and turn it into a chapbook. While it was hard to let go of so many poems, I saw that there were two kinds of poems that needed to be brought to the fore and that could complement one another. Once I made the decision to focus on “mother” in its two forms, I wrote additional poems toward that theme. Some of these newer poems ended up being distillations from essays I’d written.

What do you hope people learn/experience from the book?

I hope that Mother, Loose helps people see some of their most primal fears in a new light. Nursery rhymes, Mother Goose rhymes, and fairy tales help elucidate, normalize and lighten the burden of those fears, at times making light of them. Humor is a form of intelligence, and dark humor shows us how to live with death.

Favorite interaction with a fan or reader?

I think my favorite interaction with a reader was with a reviewer, the writer, Hannah Rodabaugh. She wrote a wonderful review of Mother, Loose in Pank that made me feel seen—as though my poems had truly landed.

What are you working on now?

My second full-length book, Locomotive Cathedral, came out last year (March 2025). It was selected in the Backwaters Press contest and published by Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. It had been ten years since Mother, Loose, so I had a blast doing readings and am pleased with the book’s reception. Right now, I’m finalizing a new collection of poems titled Fade Away & Radiate, which address or write toward what Buddhists call “the five remembrances” (e.g. this body is of the nature to age; I cannot escape aging). I’m still adding and removing poems and working on the order but I expect to be sending it out by the spring of 2026.

cover of Mother, Loose

Barry George and SIRENS AND RAIN

Headshot of Barry George

Tell us the story of your Accents Publishing book, SIRENS AND RAIN.

Sirens and Rain is a book of haiku and senryu (haiku-like poems focusing on human nature) about life in and around Philadelphia. People, animals, trees, fountains, statues, trains, life in all forms as it reveals itself in quintessential moments. With its unique variety of human and (other) natural phenomena, I have found this city to be an ideal place to write these “sketches from life.” The poems in this book came to me over a number of years—as I walked to work, taught my classes, rode my bicycle around the Schuylkill River, and otherwise encountered city life. (Note: the word “haiku” is both singular and plural; the same is true for “senryu.”)

What do you like most about it?

I like how the book is a history, in poetry, of what life was like for my wife, my cats, and me during the years we lived near the corner of 20th and Chestnut Streets. This is the intersection shown in the photograph I took for the cover. A few of the poems were written after we moved from there to another place just around the corner.

What did you have to overcome in order to finish and publish a book?

By the time I began working on the manuscript that became Sirens and Rain, I had plenty of haiku and senryu that could have conceivably been included. So the challenge was to select and arrange the best poems, or the best combination of poems, for the effect I wanted. Organizing by seasons helped; that way I could break the poems into five separate sequences (the four seasons plus a fifth chapter for late summer through early fall). In arranging the poems, I tried to juxtapose nature poems and people poems that played off one another in interesting ways. This entailed many rounds of revisions. You might say that the actual composing of the book was a matter of moving 3 X 5 cards around over and over again.

What do you hope people learn/receive/experience from reading your book?

As with haiku and senryu generally, I hope the poems in this book make readers more keenly, and in most cases more pleasurably, aware of what they encounter moment by moment in life. One of the best effects poems like these can have is to evoke for the reader a thought-feeling like, “Oh, I’ve had that experience—or seen that sight—a hundred times, but before never noticed it in all its beauty and wonder.” Or humor and charm, as the case might be.

What was your favorite interaction with a reader and/or a fan?

Because haiku and senryu can appeal so readily not only to poets and poetry enthusiasts but to folks who don’t often read poetry, I am always gratified when I learn that my brother-in-law, neighbor, landlord’s son, or high school Facebook friend “gets” and likes my poems. As for a specific interaction, I had an especially fulfilling one last fall when I visited a class that was reading Sirens and Rain as an assigned text for their Community College of Philadelphia literature course. Owing probably in no small part to how well their professor had guided their week-long study of my book, I found the students extremely engaged in and curious about writing haiku. They asked incisive questions. Then, in a kind of workshop format, I went around the room helping them with the short collections they were assigned to write. Almost to a person, perhaps TO a person, they were writing original haiku about subjects that mattered to them. As I left the classroom, literally, I felt a chill go down my spine. We had given a lot to one another.

What are you working on now? Catch us up one significant event in your life since the publication of SIRENS AND RAIN.

The most significant recent event in my writing life is that I just finished the manuscript that is the successor to Sirens and Rain. Entitled “Unofficial Portraits,” it consists of haiku and senryu that portray people by focusing on a moment or detail that is especially revealing about each person’s character. As with Sirens and Rain, the subjects span a range of settings, including work, education, neighbors, law and politics, sports, and family.

Is there anything you want to get off your chest about writing or publishing?

Why aren’t haiku about sports (other than baseball) more widely appreciated? Not a particularly pressing question but a pet peeve of mine?

cover of Sirens and Rain

Curtis Crisler and BLACK ACHILLES

Tell us the story of your Accents Publishing book, BLACK ACHILLES. What do you like most about it?

What I adore most about Black Achilles is my collaboration with Katerina Stoykova and Accents Publishing editors and staff. Through collaboration, we achieved a poetic rendering of me severing my Achilles. By facilitating collaboration and community of the artwork, cover pages, and layout, we achieved one of my best-looking and formatted books I have to date.

What did you have to overcome in order to finish and publish the book?

Black Achilles came about when I tore my Achilles playing basketball for our university’s
Homecoming Week. It was the Faculty vs. the Students. I was on the faculty. Everything went well through warmups. Then, when the game started, I ran up and down the court a couple of times before I heard what sounded like a gunshot. The body is an echo-chamber. I looked around to see if anyone else had heard it. No one did. Then, I tried to walk. My left foot flopped like a fish on dry land. One of my teammates’ husband observed me since he severed his. He told me that it was my Achilles by feeling the divot in my leg. I didn’t want to believe it, but I tore mine.

I would later have surgery—be in a cast, then shoe, then knee-cart to teach and be mobile. It was Christmastime. I laid on my back, left leg elevated on couch back, while my mother helped me convalesce. This book was about a man who felt he lost his demigod status for b-ball (alludes to Achilles). He fell to human—left with the troubles of inconvenience and frustration. The poems play in myth and realism—with each breath and rehabilitative step for mobility and functionality to rise back or at least return to a sliver of demigod. The collaboration to get the book to where it needed to be, along with rehabilitation, were two trains on two different tracks, near touching—one went east, the other west. To solve the equation for a black broken body—nebulous.

What do you hope people learn/receive/experience from reading your book?

I really enjoy the feedback I get from the book. Those who deal with body issues (disability and pain), functionality, along with identity, health, mental stability, and the two worlds that split you apart: past/future, now/then, and me/who, conflate themselves to a searching. Searching for who and what you will become from the ruins of the broken—the old body that has changed into a new body. You wonder if you will heal, or not. You think of those born with disabilities, those who become disabled, and those who never see either. Humanity stands alone. This was a reason for Kim Addonizio’s epigraph, “the wheelchairs hate the shoes,” from “The Way of the World.”

So, I played with the personification of inconvenience and frustration. I became Doc
Octopus—Spider-Man’s nemesis—a Marvel villain. This came about because I wasn’t functional per usual after surgery. One time I got up off the couch and tried to walk, only to face-plant on the floor, on a comfortable rug. Below—a few excerpts of how inconvenience and frustration and Doc Octopus took over my life, my mind, and my psyche.

Overseer
Inconvenience puts his arms around me. This hug
weighs world-winds and begs like infidelity’s lip-

stick marks. He wants me to learn how to fall again.
There’s no sophistication to hitting the ground. I do…

Or, how this barrage of doubt with the impending placement of inconvenience and frustration or Doc Octopus domesticated my mind, had me reeling in my rehabilitation. The good about it all, it gave me concepts on how to create and explore on the page. The above reveals itself in two more excerpts from Black Achilles, the first from “There’s This…”—

Scarred. There’s the little stalls, the reaching for
the soap while on two new metal appendages.
How basic science can hold you up. As Doctor
Octavius you have one flat tire—one appendage
disengaged—you can do nothing in your mania
to stop Spidey. Scarred. The stress of another fail.

The second, as follows:

Date night
Frustration and inconvenience crash “last call for alcohol,”
as if someone cried out, “is there a doctor in the house?”
As if they were both doctors. Frustration brings inconvenience
home. You hear their rattling bodies going at it in the kitchen.
You hear their angry love making cry out like stuck mad dogs.
You hear them snore like grizzly things.

What was your favorite interaction with a reader and/or a fan?
I guess the ultimate interaction would be with professors, lecturers, teachers, and poets/writers who enjoyed the book and used it in their curriculums or workshops. It’s there where questions arose about my poetics and creativity surrounding the book. It’s great to express how real-life situations can proliferate into a creative kaleidoscope of poetic endeavor. Also, to share the origin story of the book with those interested—priceless. It’s in that space where we can blossom. All interactions afterward are blessings!

What are you working on now? Catch us up on one significant event in your life since the publication of BLACK ACHILLES.

Currently, I am beginning my second term as Indiana’s Poet Laureate. It’s very fulfilling and arduous, simultaneously, but I enjoy bringing Hoosiers together via poetry. For the page, I am putting together a tentative manuscript called Imaginate. The word, “Imaginate,” came from an Eric B. & Rakim song called, “I Ain’t No Joke.” I’m trying to figure out if it will be a hybrid book, a poetry book, or a poetry book and a poetry chapbook. Still processing…

Is there anything you want to get off your chest about writing or publishing?

Writing is one of the best creative endeavors to address who and why we are us. We need more great writers. We need great publishers to publish great writers. We need more great humans too.

Christopher McCurry and THE GOSPEL OF GOD BOY

Headshot of Christopher McCurry

Tell us the story of your Accents Publishing book, THE GOSPEL OF GOD BOY.

It starts with being an older brother. What an awful and awesome responsibility that is. And I’ve got to be honest here, I really botched it up. I was mean, controlling, manipulative. I was a kid. I didn’t really understand how to be good. Eventually (and thankfully) I grew up and realized I had abused and misused my power. God Boy explores all that across themes of family, religion, myth. 

What do you like most about it?

I like that it’s bloody. I like that it’s kind of alarming. Oh. I like when I read it to myself, I feel something deep and ancient working within it.

What did you have to overcome in order to finish and publish a book?

Fear that my loved ones would be mad. Fear that it wouldn’t be as good as my first book. Fear that even though I’ve thought about all of this and wrote about it, maybe I haven’t changed all that much, after all. Maybe, just maybe, we are all evil and spiteful and tiny.

What do you hope people learn/receive/experience from reading your book?

I guess I felt, and have felt for sometime, the effects of time. I’m not really sure that it heals all wounds, but that it provides context and counterpoints–counter examples. It gives spaces for growth, if you are lucky enough to get a lot of it. Opportunities for reflection and collection, correction. So, yes, in humanity there’s violence. We kill each other. And since this isn’t a book about the consequences, it can be a book about why and how to be or become a person who loves others.

What was your favorite interaction with a reader and/or a fan?

Well, I’ve got to say I love when my wife reads my work or is sitting in the audience smiling at me. That gives me confidence and peace. Recently, someone reached out after reading God Boy and asked to get a copy of my first chapbook ever published, Splayed. That was nice of them! I don’t have any more copies, so I couldn’t help them out, but it was still fun that someone wanted to read more after finishing my book.

What are you working on now? Catch us up one significant event in your life since the publication of THE GOSPEL OF GOD BOY.

The next poetry book will be a book of love poems, for sure. And I’d love to share my short stories with the world. Finish a novel I’ve been working on for awhile. I’m working with a team of teachers to draft a Literary Arts curriculum for 6th-12th grade. My son Ecton is a full goose. Abra is a high schooler and in the Literary Arts program that I teach. And I’m leading the Bluegrass Disc Golf Association as the President for 2026. To name just a few of the things I’ve got cooking right now.

Is there anything you want to get off your chest about writing or publishing?

Imagine if every middle and high school had a Literary Arts teacher. How cool would that be? Most people don’t know this, but we need Literary Arts/Creative writing to be included in the legislation that governs Visual and Performing Arts. With that we could start developing a robust system of literary arts teachers to introduce the art of writing from a young age and help those who develop a passion for it to hone their skill and craft.

Photo of the front cover of the book, The Gospel of God Boy

Leatha Kendrick and AND LUCKIER

Headshot of Leatha Kendrick

Tell us the story of publishing AND LUCKIER.

For me, making a book is a slow process of distillation and experimentation. I had been working on a collection for a couple of years when Katerina suggested in 2019 that I submit something to Accents. So the inkling of a new book had been hovering. Katerina’s interest in looking at a collection of my poems opened the way for me to sharpen and focus what coalesced into And Luckier. Without her being there to receive this book, I might have gone on tinkering with the collection for another year. As a matter of fact, when I published Almanac of the Invisible in 2014, I already had begun to gather poems for the next book, and I had written the title poem. I revise individual poems over the course of many years. As I write new poems, my sense of each collection sharpens and refines itself. It is not an efficient process, but one I have come to love and to give myself over to.

What do you like most about it?

More than my earlier collections, And Luckier balances personal poetry with poems that engage world events. Though the poems were written before the pandemic, many of them still feel timely. Katerina’s books (her own poetry) inspire me to push boundaries, and her gentle presence as editor encouraged me to experiment. Another thing I loved about working with Katerina was that despite the fact the And Luckier came out in March, 2020, as the world was closing down, she stayed upbeat and inventive, making sure that the poems were heard widely on YouTube, the radio, and via Zoom.

What did you have to overcome to finish and publish a book?

By the time I published And Luckier I had a certain amount of faith in my own process. I had learned to believe that the book would find its shape and its place in the world eventually. However, I had to overcome the frustration of working through many drafts over several years and wanting it not to take so long between books. As I look back on those drafts now, I see that I was rushing the collection. Many of the best poems in the book were written in 2018-19. The 2017 version would have been a different book, and not as strong as the book Accents published.

What do you hope people learn/experience from reading your book?

I always hope to present readers with a range of poetic forms and a variety of ways to encounter experience, including humor and playfulness. I do not hold onto expectations for what any reader might learn from my poetry. Instead, I think in terms of giving readers a chance to be surprised or delighted or moved to look at something a little differently. These are the things I hope for when I read poetry.

What was your favorite interaction with a reader and/or fan?

Some readers have written to tell me they are grateful for my poem, “No Fear”—particularly for its realization that it’s “impossible to separate/misery and joy—the living edge of mystery.” That line, that understanding arrived with the poem itself. It was what the poem had come to teach me, and I will always be grateful for its arrival.

What are you working on now? Catch us up on one significant event in your life since the publication of AND LUCKIER.

I don’t really think of myself as a prolific writer, but I am always writing and nearly always imagining how new poems might fit together. Each time a book comes out, I will already have the start of another collection in process. I am usually working on two or three things at once. Right now I am in different stages of working on two poetry collections, as well as writing occasional essays and doing research for another project. In the past year I have had essays accepted for two anthologies, and the year before I published a long scholarly essay. 

In July, 2025, I signed a contract with Madville Publishing for a new collection, entitled Interior with Poplar. The first week January, 2026, we finished final edits. The book is slated for release in September, 2026. It is my fifth full-length collection of poems.

Front Cover of And Luckier