Yearly Archives: 2009

early turkey-day thanks

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Things I’m thankful for:

  • I’ve just sent Arts & Letters the proof of my essay “Hunger.” I’m so excited to have my essay in their spring issue!
  • One of my advisers, Joy Castro, wrote about my capstone oral for my comprehensive exams, which took place at the end of October.
  • I’m officially ABD! Or, as Joy called it in her post, All but done. Yippee!!
  • As part of my residency this past summer is: My poem “Maternal Lineage” is up on the National Park Service’s Herbert Hoover Historic Site website (a residency which was mentioned in USA Today. Wow). There’s an audio file of it too:

Maternal Lineage

  • Split This Rock accepted the panel proposal I and two other fantastic poets submitted. We’re doing a panel on writing the activist body. It’s going to be super fun!
  • My wonderful adviser Carole Levin has motivated me to look into fellowships. Thanks Carole!
  • The amazing editors at Pudding House and Dancing Girl Press are publishing my chapbooks Ghost Girl and My Imaginary, respectfully.
  • A short story I wrote has been accepted for the Fall 2009 Relief Anthology, edited by J. K. Richard. Yeah!
  • And of course: my sweet A.

news

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I just received my contributor’s copy of  Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash, and Word published by San Diego City Works Press. It’s such a great anthology! My poem “Chanticleer,” in this amazing book, is also included in my forthcoming chapbook my imaginary from dancing girl press. Lavanderia includes such writers as Tatiana de la Tierra. I met Tatiana when she spoke here at the 2007 No Limits conference. (The call for the 2009 conference is here).

Also, Poemeleon‘s just released their special issue on gender, which includes three of my poems. It’s such a great issue! Check out the work by Davi Walders and Jeannie Hall Gailey.

Illuminations nominated my poem “Wife Brand” for the 2010 Pushcart Prize.

Sure makes for good news.

Matilda in South Dakota

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I’ve just returned from Spearfish, South Dakota where I presented in the 2009 Western Literature Association Conference, “Lecturers, Matriarchs, Writers, Outdoorswomen: Voices from the Placeless Women of the West.” Joining me in the panel were two great writers, a poet scholar on “The Yellow Wallpaper” and a prose writer on gender. I read poems on Matilda Fletcher, the 19th century lecturer and suffragist from Iowa. She too spoke in South Dakota, over a hundred years ago. It was a fantastic panel. Thank you all who attended and who stopped by to say hello after the talk!

Because the conference was in the beautiful Black Hills, I did spend some time site-seeing. I made it over to Devil’s Tower, to Mount Rushmore, to the Bad Lands, and a few other spots, here and there. Even driving through South Dakota I couldn’t help but to think, what an amazing country.

Ghost Girl to make her debut

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Wonderful news! Pudding House just accepted my chapbook manuscript Ghost Girl. Yippee! I’m so excited. Pudding House is such a well know and respected press. I couldn’t be more happy. They’ve published some amazing authors in their Greatest Hits series like Annie Finch, Carole Simmons Oles, and Peggy Shumaker, to name a few. Melissa Tuckey is among their authors, a poet I was able to meet at Split This Rock in 2008. There’s also Jeannine Hall Gailey, JP Dancing Bear, and Ben Vogt, over in the deep middle.

And, poemeleon accepted 3 of my poems from another series I’ve been working on which is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press later this year, My Imaginary. Poemeleon has some great poems up, check out Dorianna Laux’s “Olympia” for example.

All this sure made for a good weekend.