Hello, friends, and happy fall! After two years in Florida, I am
thrilled to be back in a place with seasons-- especially autumn. I missed it
most of all.
September has been a wonderful month. The news I am most excited to
share is, I was selected to read with five other poets for the Woman Made Gallery's Reading Series in
Chicago! Of course, I've read at many venues in the Kansas City area (my
hometown), and in the Destin area, where I lived in Florida. This is the first
time I actually traveled to do a reading. I was heckin' nervous, but I think
the reading went well. I made some new friends, and I even sold some books!
There were readers from Texas and from the west coast, so I was not the
only non-Chicago native in the lineup. I was also not the only person who was
new to reading outside their city of residence, so that helped a lot!
The event was recorded, so I hope to have a link to a video to share
soon. The gallery will also be displaying poems that the poets read, so if
you're in the Chicago area, you can stop in and see my work in the gallery. I
also highly recommend checking out the art-- as the name of the gallery
implies, they display work by women and women-identifying artists. I had a
chance to stroll through it before the reading and was blown away by the
quality and variety of pieces.
I would like to extend my deepest thanks to gallery Nina Corwin,
gallery curator, and the rest of the lovely staff and volunteers at the Woman
Made Gallery. I am so grateful for the opportunity and the hospitality!
On the publication front, I am also pleased to share that I had some
work accepted for the inaugural edition of Doubleback Review. I received
this nice acceptance from their poetry editor, Anna Black:
Dear Lauren,
I'm excited to offer space to both "West Side Girl" and
"Minotaur's Daughter" in our first issue of the Doubleback Review.
I'm especially pleased to accept these poems. They do incredible work and the
language is at once lively and at times surprising, as well as spot-on. I so
loved reading your work and would welcome seeing it again at any time.
Thank you, Anna! I can't wait to see the issue when it goes live.
Doubleback Review has a cool mission-- to publish work that previously appeared
in now-defunct literary magazines. I absolutely love the idea of giving old
work new life!
And finally, I would love to share that Allison Blevins,
editor-in-chief at Harbor Review,
has written a lovely review on my latest collection, Requiem for a Robot Dog,
which she calls, "an epic of the everyday."
Read the full review here.
