Hi y’all! I write poetry about family, mental illness, and societal expectations. Following and breaking rules. Stigma.

Soon after my birth, my mama was diagnosed with schizophrenia and what’s now called bipolar disorder. She was sent from the US air base in Newfoundland to a hospital in Florida, while I lived with relatives in Baton Rouge—for a year. Our relationship was marked by frequent absences and a fragile love.

You can find my poems in many journals including The Kenyon Review, Okay Donkey, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, One, Many Nice Donkeys, The Inflectionist Review, Rise Up Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Stone Circle Review, and LIT Magazine. My debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), was a 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award winner and a finalist for the 8th Annual McMath Book Award. The closing poem, “Stirring the Ashes,” was a Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize finalist; journals have nominated my poems for a Pushcart and Best of the Net. I’m a reader for Tinderbox Poetry Journal‍ ‍

I live in mid-Missouri with my musician husband and our dogs Darla and Boo.

“She sounds many notes …
writing about family history, the American landscape and more elemental realities such as desire and mercy.”

—Aarik Danielsen, Pieces of the Night
(Cornerstone Press, forthcoming)

Proverbial

I want to write the poem
where Jesus himself puts grain
alcohol in the grape juice,
tells the cafeteria lady he forgot

his punch card but still wants
mystery meat and the little pleated
cup of honey and peanut butter,
forges his mom's signature

on the field trip permission slip
because she’s in a tent somewhere
menstruating, doing her part to keep
the men clean. I want to write

the poem where the diner jukebox
plays “I Walk the Line” the day
Johnny Cash dies and my daddy
orders a burger, forgets himself, sings

like the vinyl booth is the bench
seat of a Pontiac he’s driving from Chicago
to Baton Rouge, no AC, syllables
sucked into the wind before ears

can hear. I want to write the poem
where I pull the driver from a burning
car on Aurora, splint a broken ankle
in the Hoh Rain Forest, keep my dog

and ditch the lover. Instead, sunflowers
crowd a blue vase, silver-wrapped glass,
a caged sea too foolish to ignore
divine bounds, willing to be nothing.

The Kenyon Review
Spartan Press, 2024

Want a little something extra?

Sign up for some literary lagniappe—occasional emails about upcoming readings, new poems, blog posts, and craft tips.

Let's do this.