I’ve had many changes and ups and downs in my life, but one thing that has always remained constant has been my love for books. Whether reading them, writing them, or even thinking about them, books have always been a big part of my life. As the daughter of a chemistry professor and a biologist, I grew up in a family that valued education and reading. Every shelf and table space was covered with textbooks, research papers, almanacs, newspapers, and nonfiction books. As a child, I would often flip through my father’s books as he graded exams and lab reports, trying to sound out the words and familiarize myself with them even though I didn’t yet understand what they meant. I’d also read and re-read my copies of Little Bear, Judy Moody, and Dear America books until they started falling apart. On top of this, I had limitless imagination and loved to create different worlds and characters. This often involved scribbling ideas down in my Dora the Explorer notebook and having my dolls act out the scenes in dramatic Bollywood-style fashion. Storytelling was my favorite pastime because there was always a new tale to explore.
The first original poem I ever wrote was for my language arts class in second grade: a free-verse poem about nighttime, with a hand-drawn illustration of a sleepy girl and a moonlit window at the top of the page. After turning in my poem, my teacher, Ms. Emmond, pulled me aside to tell me that she loved my poem and asked if she could share it with the class. I remember how, like a public reading of an author’s latest work, she carefully read my poem to the entire class and asked me questions about my inspirations and word choice. The memory of her reading my line about falling asleep “in a bed sheet heap” and asking me about its meaning is something I cherish to this day.
My love for language continued into my middle school and high school years. As a teen who faced severe bullying and later developed anxiety and depression, reading and writing became a source of comfort and a way for me to reflect on my experiences and the world around me. In the school library, I would immerse myself in different books and genres, including children’s fantasy like The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani, YA historical fiction such as Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys, literary fiction like A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, as well as Japanese manga and graphic novels. These books introduced me to diverse, complex characters and empowered me to develop my own unique perspectives and creative styles.
This lifelong passion for literature and writing led me to major in English Language and Literature and concentrate in Creative Writing at Smith College. During my senior year at Smith, I pursued a Special Studies project where I wrote a YA historical fiction on the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, combining my interests in global history and diverse storytelling. I am grateful and excited to work with Sundress Publications and support its mission to champion traditionally underrepresented writers.
Tara Rahman (she/her) is a Sundress editorial intern with a BA in English Language and Literature from Smith College and an MSc in Global Development from SOAS, University of London. She is also a recent graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course in Oxford, UK. With a strong interest in culture, identity, and global history, her personal writing often focuses on intersectionality and the untold stories and experiences of marginalized communities. In her free time, she enjoys reading literary and YA fiction, watching anime, and spending time with her tripod cat, Tuntuni.
For this installment of We Call Upon the Author to Explain we had the tremendous honor of getting to speak to award winning writer, educator, speaker, and activist Noel Quiñones about their brilliant collection Orange, out May 5th with CavanKerry Press. This collection explores the importance of time and place and the impact both have on who we are and how we grow. Orange is a wonderfully inventive and interactive collection that manages to engage with serious subjects while also delighting the senses. It’s a beautiful collection that is sure to make you both think and smile.
Ada Wofford: On the color wheel, orange is opposite blue, making blue the complimentary color of orange. Blue, as in “the blues,” “feeling blue,” etc. Was this a conscious connection you made when choosing the title Orange for this collection? If not, what do you think about this connection and is this a fair reading of the title?
Noel Quiñones: Funnily enough, orange has been my favorite color since childhood. I’ve asked my parents and none of us can remember when I first fell in love with it but that once I did, I was obsessed. My friends called me “orange boy” in middle school because I would show up in an orange winter coat, hat, gloves, and backpack over my Catholic school uniform. I wrote a poem in college about how misunderstood I felt for my love of orange, but little did I know how right I was.
There was a very early version of this collection that was split into six sections, one for each of the primary and secondary colors: red, blue, yellow, orange, green, and violet. I tried to fit poems into my very basic understandings of these colors, a.k.a. blue meant sadness, red meant anger, yellow meant joy, etc. I was continually frustrated by this constraint and so I started researching color history and color theory, the art and science of how colors affect humans. I was absolutely blown away as I learned that colors are so much more nuanced and dynamic than I ever could have conceived. Blue, while traditionally the color of sadness, became associated with the divine when used in the twelfth century to depict the Virgin Mary; today it is at the height of its popularity, as a survey of hundreds of countries found that blue is people’s favorite color by a considerable margin. Yellow, while of course associated with value, beauty, and joy, has at the same time meant contamination, rebellion, and perversion; most famously the 1890s were known as the “Yellow Nineties” as artists pushed back against the repression of Victorian values.
Orange, it turns out, has always been hard to pin down. In reading Joann Eckstut and Arielle Eckstut’s The Secret Language of Color, I was struck by this quote: “For millennia, orange was a color without an identity. In many languages, it’s one of the very last, if not the last, color named in the rainbow.” Cultural historian Kassia St. Clair, in her book The Secret Lives of Color, talks about a similar difficulty with orange. Since it wasn’t considered its own distinct color until relatively recently, it is “forever in danger of sliding into another color: red and yellow on either side, brown below.” Without knowing it, I had chosen a color as a toddler that exemplified complexity, one that invited frustration, confusion, awe, and engagement. This made it a perfect and yet completely unplanned title.
AW: In the poem, “How to Color Mami” you use the phrase, “the sky in your world.” I was very struck by this phrase and its use of the word “your.” In a literal sense we all share the same sky and the same world, but of course it often doesn’t feel like that when faced with the reality of the disparity that exists among individuals. Can you speak a bit about why you chose this phrasing and what it means to you?
NQ: I am so happy you felt pulled to this line, it is one of my favorite lines in the whole book! I want to cite the whole line though for context: “Won’t you draw the color of the sky in your world?” First, I love it because of how random its source is, haha. The line comes from an interview with the developer of my favorite video game of all time, Psychonauts, where you play as psychic cadet being trained on how to enter someone else’s mind and help them work through their mental struggles, whether it be depression, bipolar disorder, etc. Second, there is a color theory fact that I love: no two people on the entire planet see the exact same shade of any color. This disparity in individual experience, as you name, was central to my collection as I navigated three different peoples experience of a divorce: my mother, my father, and myself.
I chose this phrasing, put the phrase in my mother’s voice, and made this poem the first in the book because I wanted to invite the reader to consider that not only are there many different skies, but so often we don’t even get asked the question. We presume we are sharing the same experience or, when faced with a diversity of perspective, run away from the weight of holding multiple truths at once. As the first poem, I wanted readers to hopefully hold this question as they journeyed through the collection.
AW: “How to Spit Game on Mosholu Parkway” struck me as a time capsule of the early 2000s. Later in the collection you fittingly title another reference-laden poem, “The Time Capsule.” I grew up during this time too and was charmed by the various references in these two poems (the HitClips one especially made me smile), but for younger readers who did not experience that decade, what do you hope they take away from these poems?
NQ: HitClips forever! My cousin actually still has hers; we found them when unpacking her boxes after a move. Building on that, I hope the take away is that we must cherish our knickknacks. I don’t expect younger readers to know or research all of my references, but I do hope my love for this decade, for these random trends, items, and slang, endears them to do the same.
As a fellow millennial, you understand that we straddled two worlds, the analog and the digital. As we continue to move online, I find myself more and more attached to the physical. I have a VHS and DVD collection, I’ve been keeping every movie ticket I ever got since 2009, and I have binders of Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I believe there is something important about keeping things, for nostalgic reasons of course, but also for historical documentation. And so, I hope younger readers create their own time capsules like I did.
AW: Can you speak about the importance of “place” in this collection and how you use it? (I’m referring to your use of various references to places such as Jerome Ave, the Bronx, “Dogshit Park,” even Burger King; but feel free to take it further than this if you wish to speak about an inner space, a metaphorical space, etc.)
NQ: This feels so connected to the previous question. Growing up, all I heard about the Bronx was how terrible, ghetto, dirty, disgusting, dangerous, and ignored it was. On top of that, when people said these things, they directed them toward the South Bronx. I grew up in the North Bronx, in a tight knit community, where there was of course danger but also connection.
This collection is a time capsule in and of itself, for not just a time period but a place that was never talked about. The North Bronx is worthy of stories, historical documentation, and celebration. I want more pieces of art about the Bronx, about Oakland, about the Southside of Chicago, about all the places in our country so stereotyped, misunderstood, and silenced that we don’t even consider them “places”. What few stories we have about the Bronx are negative, and so I hope that Orange can be a story that contradicts, that combats, and makes people question what they believe about my hometown.
AW: Ms. Frizzle is another distinctly Millennial reference, why did you choose her to be a character in this collection?
NQ:Orange is deeply influenced by my mother’s job as an elementary school teacher of 29 years in the South Bronx. I like to say that my mother was a teacher both at work and at home. She truly enjoyed teaching and saw learning as a necessary part of life, whether it was reading books, visiting museums, or attending cultural events. This made it particularly hard to watch her feelings toward teaching sour over time, not because of teaching itself, but because of the New York Department of Education’s ever shifting and last-minute mandates and society’s lack of investment in teachers. When I made the decision to become a teacher, she cautioned me against it. But her influence had already been cemented; I wanted to do what she did. I’ve proudly taught high school for over 7 years.
As I mentioned before, I grew up hearing the most terrible things about the Bronx. But it went beyond that because I was being “taught” how to view the place I lived at the same time I loved where I grew up. I knew that I wanted to find a way to write poems about these dangerous perceptions, that I needed a persona to hold these contradicting themes. But who?
The answer came when I saw a post from @millennialmisery on Instagram (to anyone reading this, please follow if you grew up in the 90s, it is so funny and nostalgic!). They had posted a GIF from an episode of The Magic School Bus, where Ms. Frizzle takes her students through the life cycle of salmon. Not only is the school bus transformed into a salmon, but the students are turned into salmon fish eggs and then fertilized. The caption of the GIF read, “Remember when the Magic School Bus kids got jizzed on by salmon?” The comments were filled with hysterical comments about how Ms. Frizzle would get put in jail for consistently putting her students in danger. I laughed and laughed and laughed and then had a lightbulb moment.
What if we not only named Ms. Frizzle’s negligence, but also humanized her by highlighting the challenges of teaching? By using this larger-than-life character, I could showcase the nuances of being a teacher as well as the very act of teaching. I ended up writing a series of poems in the voice of Ms. Frizzle, trying my best to show her reservations, her well-intentions, her biases, her adventurousness, and her deviousness. In her I had found a way to comment on the larger themes of my collection without relying on my loved ones, offering a distance that I hope invoked the lofty power and responsibility teachers had.
AW: This might somewhat relate to the last question, but as an educator what value do you think poetry has as an educational tool—both for teachers using poetry in the classroom as well as for readers engaging with poetry outside of the classroom on their own terms?
NQ: I am currently a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center (CPC), where I get to teach poetry in Chicago public schools across the city. One of my favorite schools I teach at, a largely first-generation immigrant middle school, has continued to prove to me that poetry has incredible value as an educational tool. I have many students who have either recently learned English or are trying to improve their ability in it. Poetry allows them the opportunity to see language as a playground, not a strict set of rules that overwhelms them. CPC encourages us to tell students that we don’t care about your spelling or grammar during our sessions; we care about you expressing yourself to the best of your ability. This invitation, to not just wordplay but also telling a story on your own terms, has produced poems that remind me every week of the power of this art form. I could describe some here, but I’d rather encourage people to read some of the student poems at our website; we publish 2-3 poems a week from all of our classrooms across the city.
As for people engaging with poetry outside of the classroom, I am so encouraged by the way spoken word poetry has expanded and continued poetry’s important cultural legacy. While all creative writing allows for people to feel connected to another’s story, I believe there is a unique openness and care in poetry, with its invitation to break conventions, to say the thing beneath the thing, to elicit emotion at the smallest levels of language that teach us all how to “feel.”
AW: This collection is wonderfully engaging, from scanning a QR code to having to hold one poem up to a mirror in order to read it, why did you decide that this approach was essential to what you were aiming to express/accomplish with this collection?
NQ: As a high school student, I was introduced to poetry through spoken word, where interaction was a mandatory part of it. We used our voice and body language to bring the audience more intimately into the poem. I wanted to do the same thing on the page, to push against the passiveness of the reading experience, to invite the reader to collaborate in meaning making, and perhaps gain something deeper from having to engage.
At the same time, this collection is about understanding my parent’s decisions through and after their divorce, accepting my queer identity, and learning accountability as an AMAB person. These were all, and still are, struggles I am navigating, and so I created these poetic forms that require some kind of effort, in the hopes that the effort the reader puts in highlights my efforts as a person navigating these things.
AW: Lastly, is there anything else you’d like readers to know about this collection or upcoming projects, talks, workshops, etc.?
NQ: I gotta say, I love how all of your questions are allowing me to give intertwined answers! And so, building on the previous question on engagement, I am actually working closely with my friend, fellow teacher, and paper engineer, Jean Kim, to create a 3D chapbook of selected poems from Orange that push the interactivity of my work to their fullest potential. This chapbook will have a limited run but will be available at my in-person events. I can’t wait to share it!
In terms of other projects, the experience of creating Orange really put me on a path toward interactivity across multiple artistic mediums. In the time since I finished Orange, I’ve written two award winning short stories, gained a video game writing certification, and finished Justice for my Sister’s BIPOC Sci-Fi Screenwriting Lab, where I wrote my first TV show pilot. To keep up with all that, people can sign up for my Email Newsletter here.
Noel Quiñones is an Emmy and O. Henry award-winning Nuyorican writer from the Bronx. Their work has been published in Poetry, Boston Review, Poem-a-day, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT anthology, as well as the Michigan Quarterly Review, for which they won the 2025 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize. Their short story, “This Time and the Next” will be included in The Best Short Stories 2026: The O. Henry Prize Winners. They have also received fellowships from Periplus, CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, the Poetry Foundation, the Watering Hole, and the Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and founder of Project X, a Bronx-based spoken word poetry organization, Noel is currently a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center. You can follow Noel at www.noelpquinones.com.
Ada Wofford (they/them) holds MAs in both English and Library Studies. In addition to working at a rare book shop, they are an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, the editor of We Call Upon the Author to Explain, and the non-fiction editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection. Their writing has appeared in The Blue Nib, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Autostraddle, Capable Magazine, Sundress Reads, and more. Their chapbook, I Remember Learning How to Dive, was published in 2020, part of which earned them a Pushcart Prize nomination.
This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is an excerpt from Roadmap: A Choreopoem by Monica Prince (Santa Fe Writer’s Project 2023).
Proposal
DORIAN May my love for you meditate across my tongue like a perpetual prayer. I want every part of you, perfect and loud. If you open, I will enter,
a willing participant in this sorcery, this explosion, this body built of blue and bone. May the map we draw together lead our children home, a compass tattooed in our smiles, our joy. I cannot scrub you from my pores, now stained with your magic. Take me from this Earth if ever I should try.
Monica Prince (she/her) serves as an Associate Professor of Activist and Performance Writing at Susquehanna University and the author of three choreopoems, Roadmap, How to Exterminate the Black Woman, and the recently released FORCE. She writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation, and she shares her life with her polycule and three disrespectful cats.
Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.
I have never read a collection like Jennifer Overfield’s That Same Dream (Glacial Speed Press 2025). The poems, as beautiful and melancholic as they are, comprise only one aspect of a threefold project. They become deeper and more complex when experienced alongside the woodblock print of the cover, designed by Lucinda Cobley, and the musical accompaniment composed by Bruce Chao. To fully experience the poetry of Jennifer Overfield, a reading of the project, alongside the dynamic sound collage can be found on YouTube, released by DistroKid. However, the written elements of That Same Dream, despite their foundational role in the TSD Collective project, still hold their own quiet mystery.
Reading the text brought to mind many images, which is no doubt a result of Overfield’s own use of metaphor and imagery, alongside the overall evocative nature of her poetry. This montage of pictures compounds an overall sense of comfortable isolation, like a weekend spent hiding from the world with a lover. The collection lacks complex descriptors, as it relies on the reader’s associations with each illustrated fragment. The third poem in particular,: ‘A dream. / A piece of glass.A dream that blew / my dress.’ allows proximity to the dream. A piece of glass and a dress blur together to create an amorphous and unique reading experience for the reader. One that could be interpreted as comfort, nostalgia, melancholia and beyond. As I read, I found myself reacquainted with an old sense of both loneliness and serenity.
In a way reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage, which combines and juxtaposes shots to produce narrative meaning, impressions, or associations of ideas for the viewer, Overfield’s poetry similarly juxtaposes images to generate meaning for the reader. Each image imprints something on the next, and as the collection circles back around to the beginning again, they all gain in depth. And I do mean this literally—That Same Dream is a wonder of traditional handset type methods, a limited edition: pure white Japanese Kozo and Pulp paper running in one slip and folded for each page. Each hand-bound copy offers a platform for Overfield’s poems, each one soft and almost skeletal—the lines resemble black ink ribs against the fine paper. It is a collection of marked contrast. Each image striking and indicative of the next, each letter a rebellion against the paper it resides upon, each moment of unfolding pages subverts the way we are taught to read.
With mentions of God throughout the collection, Overfield stirs a sensation of divine listlessness onto the page. ‘God is a grown man’, ‘the ocean was a word God kept / repeating’, ‘getting God to forgive me’; the ‘God’ of Overfield’s text is always capitalised, always male. Familiar, in the way that divinity seems to brush against our lives, whether or not it is invited. Yet this God is strange, an aspect of Overfield’s prose that stood out to me compared to the rest. This is not because he exerts influence over the narrator or holds visible authority over the poems, but because his divine presence seems to lack intention or intellect—because he seems lost.
The recording, a melodious, almost insidious experience of the poem, is available on YouTube. At a thirteen-minute runtime, the reading adds a far greater depth to the poems than a reader might understand on their first listen. Compiled audio of a dog barking, fire crackling, radio static and many other distorted sounds accompany the poetry readings. Monotonous and eerie, at times almost extraterrestrial, the reading bleeds through into the divine implications of the collection. Although every image is undoubtedly human and familiar, often simple in its description, they hide a myriad of disguised sensations. For instance, in the tenth poem:
…is either light coming through the open door
or you
in the bathroom in an open shirt.
These scattered phrases share the intimacy of the narrator with ‘you’. They show the vulnerability of the addressee, with the images creating a montage evocative of ‘light coming through the open door’. A luminescent collation of hope, comfort, openness, and reassurance.
Amidst themes of growth, companionship, dreams and divinity, Overfield’s narrator takes up an introspective murmur, such a soft quiet that I felt I should make my breathing quiet, for fear of disturbing each tender thought as I read. The poet demonstrates a deep understanding of descriptive restraint and lexical precision. And with so few words, That Same Dream depicts so much.
To learn more about the TSD Collective and hear about the project in the words of the creators themselves, visit their website.
Rachel Bulman (she/her) holds a BA in English and Creative Writing as well as an MA in Publishing from the University of Exeter, specialising in interactive and children’s fiction. Her written work has appeared in The Book of Choices, Velvet Fields, and Exeposé, among others. Find her on Instagram @worm.can.read, through her online portfolio, or ask the bridge troll who taught him his riddles three.
This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is an excerpt from Roadmap: A Choreopoem by Monica Prince (Santa Fe Writer’s Project 2023).
Roadmap: A Family Name
DORIAN The blueprint for the house where love lives is stamped on my DNA. My skeleton is the rebar in the walls, my blood the mortar between bricks. I learned love from the bodies who fashioned me, whose choices funneled through generations. They are my roadmap. A family tree strewn across street signs and construction zones, etched on the insides of my hands. I follow the tire tracks back to the first acceleration. Whose bones broke to make mine? Watch.
Monica Prince (she/her) serves as an Associate Professor of Activist and Performance Writing at Susquehanna University and the author of three choreopoems, Roadmap, How to Exterminate the Black Woman, and the recently released FORCE. She writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation, and she shares her life with her polycule and three disrespectful cats.
Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.
This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is an excerpt from Roadmap: A Choreopoem by Monica Prince (Santa Fe Writer’s Project 2023).
A Child, a Shot, a Name
THE NOVELIST(once silent) … There are Black people in the future.
They grow up. They grow old. You have a choice— will you love him now, when he can still smell the flowers you present, or will you only love him
later, a hashtag for the cause, another morsel stuck in the bloody teeth of white supremacy’s maw? …
Monica Prince (she/her) serves as an Associate Professor of Activist and Performance Writing at Susquehanna University and the author of three choreopoems, Roadmap, How to Exterminate the Black Woman, and the recently released FORCE. She writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation, and she shares her life with her polycule and three disrespectful cats.
Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.
This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is an excerpt from Roadmap: A Choreopoem by Monica Prince (Santa Fe Writer’s Project 2023).
Past, Present, Prophecy
DORIAN … I’ve been looking for joy in books and lovers and television for as long as I’ve known how to laugh. I won’t stop being scared, stop wondering if Blackness makes me predisposed to violence, frailty, and loss. It does. I know that now. The problem with politics is you can’t avoid them when your body is political. I was born with this skin, this fire, this target painted on my chest. How privileged to not get involved, to go back to your lives and forget about this flesh lying on the pavement, one more parent who doesn’t come home, one more funeral, one more reason to send thoughts and prayers.
Don’t send them. We can’t use them.
Trauma is the fabric of America. We love violence and call it human nature. But I will not sacrifice my beloved to fetishists of blood. Instead, I will raise a child with clean hands, who learns what harm looks like in the fingerprints of others. I want a new tradition of pleasure in my children, reckless abandon in the name of beauty, a map drawn in the pursuit of sustained disruption for justice.
Monica Prince (she/her) serves as an Associate Professor of Activist and Performance Writing at Susquehanna University and the author of three choreopoems, Roadmap, How to Exterminate the Black Woman, and the recently released FORCE. She writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation, and she shares her life with her polycule and three disrespectful cats.
Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Brynn Martin. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, April 25th, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/sundress with the password “safta”.
Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!
The theme for April’s Poetry Xfit is “Joy.” In the uncertain, dispiriting, and often violent times we are living through, it can be difficult to hold onto comfort and, even more so, happiness. While writing is often a tool to process trauma and hopelessness, it is just as important to find and celebrate joy and warmth through the gloom.
Brynn Martin (she/her) is a Midwesterner at heart, but she has spent the last decade living in Knoxville, where she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Tennessee. She is an Associate Editor for Sundress Publications and the event manager for an indie bookstore. Her poetry has appeared in Contrary Magazine, Rogue Agent, FIVE:2:ONE, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Writing the Speculative Diaspora,” a workshop led by Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin on Wednesday, April 8th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: SAFTA).
Every story is a diaspora story, and every diaspora story is speculative in nature. In this craft talk and workshop, open to all genres, students will gain an appreciation for diaspora stories and be able to spot and understand the presence of the speculative within them. We’ll discuss perspectives on diaspora narratives from authors such as Ocean Vuong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, R.F. Kuang, and Ling Ma; diaspora stories’ role in challenging western storytelling conventions; and how diaspora pushes against genre, concepts of truth and authenticity, and the confines of individuality and representation. We’ll then discover the speculative diaspora form and its potential, and explore the speculative diaspora through writing prompts such as truth/lie (“speculative truth”)/dream activities and a collective storytelling exercise.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin via Venmo: @kylayen or PayPal @KylaYenHuynhGiffin
Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin (they/them) is a queer and trans, biracial, Vietnamese American diaspora writer whose speculative work focuses on diaspora, transness, ecology, empire, and intergenerational histories. They are a Press Editor for Half Mystic Press, a Co-Coordinator for Sundress Publications’ Poets in Pajamas, and an Associate Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. Kyla-Yến’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and appears in The Offing, Oroboro, Vănguard, and other publications. They have been awarded residencies, workshops, and/or fellowships from Tin House, the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA), Seventh Wave, Abode Press, and more.
This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block (The Word Works 2025).
Allegory With Human Host
Trust me like the little dog has to, having been so denatured. Having so little to do with a wolf. Follow me to a sinking city where the weather hums, where the leaves grow monster-wide.
I put my faith in larvicide and lizards, in the tongues of frogs. I built a house from salt and fossil shells.
Outside the bullfrog sings for his bride, for the mouse and the limp-tailed rat. The tail of a cat or some animal flicks at the slats of our bedroom window.
I told our boy, in so many words, the fate of foxes. I told him the tree frog is a friend— that even poison has its place. But still he woke with a red ring rising from his side.
A ring of roses is either an amulet or an ornament. Either way I hung a wreath outside our door.
I said trust me like the little dog has to. Trust me, son, to be the mother that all soft animals require and the little dog laughed.
Mary Block (she/her) is the author of Love from the Outer Bands (Word Works Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Nimrod International Journal, and Sonora Review, among other publications, and can be found online at Rattle, SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer—The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, a 2018 Best of the Net finalist, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Mary lives in her hometown of Miami, Florida with her spouse, her young children, and her old dachshund. She is an editor at SWWIM.
Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.
