2018 was a lucky and joyful year for me, filled with a handful of finalist nods, the birth of my son Theodore in August, and two book acceptances in December!
My chapbook I Almost was Animal won the 2018 WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Prize hosted by Writer’s Relief and has just been published through Amazon. It has been such a cool experience working on it with the teams at Writer’s Relief and at Amazon, and it was a particularly cool moment when Amazon sent me an email suggesting to me that I might like my own book.
My full-length manuscript Somewhere to Go won the 19th annual Poetry Awards from Elixir Press and is due out later this year.
Both of these collections are comprised of poems I’ve been writing, revising, and compiling for the better half of a decade, and amazingly they were accepted at a time I’d almost resigned myself to the idea that they may never see the light of day.
I’m so grateful to so many people for their support and friendship that helped me create these books and get them out into the world, and I’ll be telling them so in the pages of Somewhere to Go. But I’d like to just say now a thanks to a couple of the key organizations and friends who helped me with them—in particular friend and mentor Fred Marchant, Colrain faculty Joan Houlihan and Peter Covino, and magical friend and poem-intuiter Hannah Larrabee. Also, many of the poems in these books were sparked when I was a resident at the Noepe Center’s Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s Residency, run by the wonderful Justen Ahren. I would be a very different writer had I not spent time there, and I’m so grateful to have had that opportunity.
I Almost was Animal is available here (or as an e-book here). More to come!