O my people—they loved words. Misunderstood bible verses, nursery rhymes, and misquoted lines of Shakespeare. There’s nothing like the early seventeenth century rhythms of King James’ English. It’s why so many folks hold on the KJV, when better translations abound: why should we work to understand something in […]
Landscape with Womb and Paradox, Erica Goss’s second full-length poetry collection, was published by Broadstone Press in January 2026. My debut, full-length collection of poems, Night Court, took three years and thirty submissions before it found a home at Glass Lyre Press, winning the 2016 Lyrebird prize, with […]
As I’ve been making other resource lists, I’ve been slowly tucking all the queer lit journals and mags off to the side so I could give them their own list. Because they/we needed their/our own list. Thus, I present to you: a completely non-exhaustive list of lgbtq2s+ centered journals and lit […]
“Ekphrasis” often conjures up memories of going to a local art museum, sitting in front of a painting, and writing a poem about how the artwork makes you feel, your interpretation of the piece, or the mindset you think the artist was in when they painted it. I […]
When I first became a teacher, I was afraid of teenagers. I’d escaped high school and had no desire to revisit it. I didn’t feel brave enough or tough enough, so I started with preschoolers, imagining that a child’s first classroom would be the gentlest place to learn […]
When my book, The Animal at Your Side, won the Airlie Prize in 2019, it was the culmination of a seven-year submissions process in which I often wondered whether to keep going. I finished the book in 2012 and started sending it out in earnest in 2013. I didn’t […]
Y’all, 2026 is supposedly not a normal year from an astrological perspective. Neptune enters Aries on January 26th for the first time since the 1860s. Saturn follows in February. These two planets then meet on February 20th—a conjunction that hasn’t happened in Aries for centuries. (Chani Nicholas calls […]
I used to be a perfectionist “No work of art is ever completed, just abandoned” – Paul Valery We all know this, and yet we all want assurances that our writing is truly solid before we send it out. For example, when I was a young writer, I […]
It’s gay pride month, and here I’m publishing a love story between a transgender person and I. It never crossed my mind that I would write an LGBTQ oriented POETRY collection, just like it never crossed my mind I would ever be in a relationship with a transgender […]
This post was adapted from four essays in the author’s monthly poetry craft newsletter, lullabies & alarms. After sketching out a poem, the next steps can feel daunting. In this post I’ll share 6 steps I usually take when revising my poems, with hopes they will help make […]
