New Books, New Places to Share Poetry & the Colorado Time Machine
After twelve years of teaching composition, creative writing, and poetry at Westfield State University, I decided not to return there last fall, so this past academic year was a major shift. The labor of running a small poetry press remains a joy and a challenge and is ever-expanding, so that keeps me plenty busy, and the first half of 2025 included many fulfilling experiences teaching poetry and working with students. In January, I taught “The Art and Business of Poetry” for the second year at Smith College over winter term. That month I also attended the winter residency at the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University to work with student poets in their MA and MFA programs. I’d been reading manuscripts and presenting online at Wilkes residencies since January 2021, but this was my first in-person experience in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. I returned to PA for the summer residency in June as well, and in between I served as the James Merrill Visiting Poet at Amherst College for the spring (a position I held there in the spring of 2023 as well). I dearly loved teaching at Amherst and will hold my time there close, as I’m not sure when I’ll be in the classroom again.
In April, I shared in some spaces that my second full-length collection, Singing from the Deep End, had been accepted for publication at CavanKerry Press, where my first book, Uncertain Acrobats, was published in 2021. The book will be out in February 2026, and before long I’ll have a cover to reveal and a presale to shout out about. I couldn’t be happier to be publishing a second collection with CavanKerry. Here’s the post I made when the news went public:
Last year’s Perugia Press publication, Joan Kwon Glass’s Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, has been showered with accolades this spring. I traveled to AWP in LA in March, the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival in Durham, NH in April, and the Mass Poetry Festival in Salem, MA in May to represent Perugia. We’ve been hard at work choosing, editing, and designing our 2025 title: Holli Carrell’s debut collection Apostasies. Earlier this month we revealed the cover, and we’ll begin presales next week.
I’m looking forward to reading this week in two in-person events. The first, coming up this Thursday, July 10 at 7pm, is the inaugural reading in a new series at UMass Downtown, “a place to connect campus to the community.” Nathan McClain is the featured reader, and I’m honored to be joining him along with Matt Donovan and Jen Jabaily-Blackburn.
This Sunday, July 13, I’ll be part of the Shelburne Falls Porch Fest at the “Poetry Porch,” located at 105 Main Street and featuring Martín Espada and Lauren Marie Schmidt at 1:00, Doug Anderson, Abbot Cutler, and Candace Curran at 2:00, and yours truly with Adrie Rose and Liz Falco at 3:00. This is always a super friendly and cool community music festival, and it will be a treat to help bring poetry to the scene.
I’ve had a lot of beautiful adventures so far this year. Visiting Colorado stands out as the place to mention. On my way to and from LA for AWP in March, I stopped there for five-to-six hour layovers to visit with my son, Max, who currently lives in Denver. Here’s me wearing wings in the river district in Denver, a shot of the terrain at Huntington Gardens in San Marino, CA where I visited before leaving LA, and then Max and me on a hike in Golden, CO on my way home.
These next are from a trip my husband and I took to Colorado in May to see Max and family friends. One highlight was hiking in the Great Sand Dunes National Park in southern CO, where my Massachusetts heart and my Colorado heart found common ground. We traveled there from Joyful Journey Hot Springs in Moffat, which is the site of the pictured labyrinth at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It’s said you can’t go back again in life. I was there with dear friends over twenty-five years ago; the place was still magic, and it felt like a kind of time travel to get to return to such a beloved spot.
