The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Alexa White. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, September 27th, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/poetryxfit.
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!
Alexa White is a mixed-race, neurodivergent writer and graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she earned her BA in Creative Writing and Studio Art. Alexa lives in Knoxville, her semi-hometown, and is the Creative Director and Assistant Editor at Sundress. She takes delight in backroads, quarries, and the last few seconds of sunset and redefines her bedtime nightly.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “For Colored Girls: A Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf” a workshop led by Monica Prince, on Wednesday, September 9th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can register for the event here.
Join us for an online celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Broadway debut of Ntozake Shange’s seminal work, For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuff. This showcase of poets who’ve performed Shange’s work and/or been inspired by it, includes choreopoet, director, and educator Monica Prince who will lead the evening. She will be joined by an incredible line-up of poets including Shakeema Smalls, M. Mick Powell, Sullivan Summer, Jasmine Blooms and Rosa Castellano.
The evening will start and end with Shange’s words with the aim of inspiring a new generation to read her work and to give time and space to the sharing of what that work has meant to those present. It will be heart opening.
If you would like to support Sundress, you may make a charitable donation here in lieu of a ticket purchase. Your contribution supports our commitment to offering experiences like this to our community at no cost, improving arts accessibility for all.
This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed so far this year.
Merrick’s fourth selection for the mid-year best of 2026 is from local remedies by Chiagoziem Jideofor (Host Publications 2026).
in today’s terms
the war ended when we had just folded
the impact was leaden we picked up panic
it then grew to become war hence the need to tell it in parts
in today’s terms are dazed and struggling
while the generals patrol the streets coordinate door-to-door
at home, we stay worrying why we aren’t yet dazzling,
when a greater force met our bodies like businesses stockpiling only rebel notes
with the flies circling and buzzing picked up bulk in adjourning rooms
that happened differently, and attach local colors
war means people are in no hurry with replacements
with an air in the name of civil obedience
the boys asking so unlike the sun in our flag
Chiagoziem Jideofor (she/her) is Queer and Igbo. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, berlin lit, The Lincoln Review, Passages North, Commonwealth’s adda, the minnesota review, Shō Poetry Journal, MAYDAY, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from the University of Alabama and is currently a PhD student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. A 2026 Best of the Net and 2025 AWP Intro Journal Awards winner, Merrick’s poetry appears in citizen trans* {project}, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed so far this year.
Merrick’s next selection for the mid-year best of 2026 is from The Fault by Marcela Sulak (Black Lawrence Press 2024).
WEDDING GIFT
The print that began the ending of my marriage was so gorgeous, I’d forgotten how gorgeous it was in real life, laid out on the examination table, as the framer and I took measure of what lay before us—the paper itself and the textures, alive and breathing. The whale inside it shook a bit and swished, but it might have been the waves brushing against a stone, or it might not have been water at all, just strange birds in the Negev against a blue and white sky about to blink off without the fanfare of sunset. Tears burst when my fingertips brushed it. The framer, also, cleared his throat upon sliding it from its canister and unfolding it across the table. He touched the ragged edges and caressed the signature—print 1 of 12, he whispered. Every time he touched it he asked permission, as if we were lovers—may I remove it from its box? May I spread it out? The framer is going to Monte Negro for a week, so he’ll have it ready on Friday, Sept. 20. Once home, I undress and wait in bed, the sheets and covers indeterminate colors of green, for the dream to return to the point it left off, the last time I touched it. Then I was swimming all night through the air/sand/water that was the page of the print, and while nothing in particular happened, it was the nothing particular that happens when you walk on a strange and beautiful landscape for the first time. Or the nothing particular that ends a marriage. Then every leaf and every water drop and every strange flower is a happening.
Marcela Sulak (she/her) has authored five poetry collections, most recently, The Fault, and the National Jewish Book Awards Finalist, City of Skypapers (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her six translations of poetry collections from Czech, French, and Hebrew, have been recognized by PEN and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is managing editor of The Ilanot Review, and she directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. A 2026 Best of the Net and 2025 AWP Intro Journal Awards winner, Merrick’s poetry appears in citizen trans* {project}, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed so far this year.
Merrick’s second selection for the mid-year best of 2026 is from Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest (The University of Nebraska Press 2025).
Protections
Against the whir of my treadmill a shot rings out
and a wolf is gunned down—O-Six, they named her,
numinous alpha female of Yellowstone National Park
because she survived solo.
Even the commentator says this was unusual
and dangerous; yet she was beloved for acuity
and beauty, face like an owl mask against snow white.
I listen as the hunter celebrates his kill, the documentary
rolling. My treadmill rolling.
They had lifted the ban on hunting wolves that year—
endangered status just long enough for a female
to become her own pack, survive, surpass the males of her kind.
Kimberly Ann Priest (she/her) is a writer and visual artist whose book Wolves in Shells won the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press. She is the author of four full-length books of poetry and an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University. Her poetry has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, and Birmingham Poetry Review.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. A 2026 Best of the Net and 2025 AWP Intro Journal Awards winner, Merrick’s poetry appears in citizen trans* {project}, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
Yance Wyatt’s The Watersmith (Regal House Publishing, 2026) is a thoroughly Appalachian tale that seeks to interact with familial conflict and cyclical addiction by focusing on its protagonist’s development. Jack Calloway, a father and alcoholic, grapples with the way his relationship with his son mirrors his relationship with his own father. Wyatt writes with a distinct voice that still escapes from being the focus of his writing—instead, his strength lies in the way he intertwines the setting’s atmosphere with the characters’ drive and personalities. With a decently tight-knit cast of characters, The Watersmith covers a lot of ground in a relatively short page count and does so without feeling unnecessarily distilled.
Set predominantly in Marion County, Tennessee, The Watersmith follows Jack Calloway through his relationships with his wife, son, and self as the family is forced to confront the ways they deal with grief, regret, and permanency. When Jack and his half-estranged son JJ find a somewhat dilapidated moonshine still on his recently deceased parents’ land, the two decide to repair it. Jolene—Jack’s wife—steps in only to get caught in a severe fire, suffering debilitating wounds to her entire upper body. Jolene is rendered unable to see and hear, and Jack sets out on a progressively more and more drastic journey to produce essential oils and perfumes that he can offer her as a sort of olive branch.
The most thought-provoking parts of The Watersmith lie in the way Wyatt highlights the cyclical nature of alcoholism and other kinds of addiction. Jack’s relationship with alcohol subtly hangs over the narrative—it’s an aspect of his disposition that he refuses to fumble with after the story’s turning point, but one that he retreats to in similarly destructive albeit less obvious ways. Jack’s relationship with JJ serves as a yardstick by which to measure his priorities and selfishness. At one point, Jack says, “Sometimes the fondness for it skips a generation and boomerangs back. Not usually, though. Usually, it’s more like a baton.” Wyatt is in dialogue with a certain kind of duality in regards to the way he thematically explores addiction. It’s passive (waiting for the boomerang), but not without a sense of violence (the boomerang itself). It’s active (the passing of the baton), and it’s also accepted (the taking of the boomerang). Jack’s relationship with JJ is intertwined with his relationship with alcohol in a way, yet Wyatt does not rail on such a connection in a way that makes the reader bored of it.
The aspect of Jack’s character that I came back to most frequently while reading was his glaring disregard for the upkeep of his relationships. Yes, he cares about Jolene; yes, he cares about JJ—but he seemed to lack any kind of urgency in the way he interacts with either of them. Most of his actions seem dispassionate on some level, yet the narrative (being in first person from his point of view) focuses on his thoughts and emotions. While I feel as though one result of this focus made both Jolene and JJ feel like relatively flat characters who served primarily as plot devices in Jack’s story, such a phenomenon could also serve to highlight the distance Jack’s addiction created between him and the people around him. His thoughts on his loved ones often circle back to himself as is displayed in a thought he has during an interaction with JJ. Jack comments, “Now, if there’s one thing a man can’t stand, it’s witnessing the worst part of himself in another.” Thus, the story’s hyperfocus on Jack serves, in a way, to reinforce the frequently cyclical nature of abuse and addiction.
Jack’s character development eventually begins to create its own cyclical movement, and his relationships with his family and his own inventiveness are pulled along on the journey. Wyatt writes Jack in a way that makes him feel both stagnant and evolving at the same time. He’s thrust forward in some areas while being pulled backwards in others—the areas where Jack regresses are duplicated by the areas where he improves, and both sides of the equation are being pushed and pulled at by interacting factors in his disposition and environment. Thus the thematically cyclical nature of the history and physical environment of the story are both condensed and expanded within Jack as a character, and many moving parts are sharpened by the way they rebound from each other.
Joan Alft (she/any) is an undergraduate student at the University of Tennessee studying publishing and creative writing. Her short story “Pilgrim” can be found in the summer 2026 edition of Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine where she works as an Assistant Prose/Fiction Editor. Gothic themes and relationships, the dichotomy between the familiar and unfamiliar, and confusingly intense devotion in places where it shouldn’t be are a few things she enjoys seeing in others’ art and tries integrating in her own projects. In her free time, Joan collects physical media (records, cassettes, DVDs, CDs, and VHS tapes, oh my!), hangs out at local coffeeshops, and sews on occasion.
This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed so far this year.
Merrick’s first selection for the mid-year best of 2026 is from These Aren’t My Woods Anymore by Soon Jones (Poetose Press 2025).
You Could Be Pretty
When my breasts betrayed me the first time by arriving before I was ten, my stepmother forced me to wear lacey bras and satin underwear, telling me not to be a whore as she threw me at any boy or grown man who looked, hoping for a shotgun marriage.
So I stopped wearing dresses outside of church and at weddings. I stopped wanting to be pretty. Wore thrifted Timberland boots and large shirts, carried knives.
I treated makeup like an exotic curiosity and yes, it makes me pretty. Creates someone new
and vulnerable, someone who looks safe. Instead I learned to throw a punch without breaking my wrists. Learned to throw grown men over my hip like fussy children. Developed an early eye for tight groupings, center mass.
Learned to hold a rifle as close as a lover to my shoulder, and open my bones to each bullet’s shockwave, to the unrelenting hunger of the world.
Soon Jones (they/them) is a Korean-American lesbian poet and writer raised in the rural countryside of the American South. They are a Lambda Literary Fellow with an MFA from Oklahoma State University. Their work has appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Denver Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Moon City Review, and others, and their debut collection, These Aren’t My Woods Anymore, is out now from Poetose Press. When not writing poems or working on cars, you can find Soon going on long walks through nature or stargazing.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. A 2026 Best of the Net and 2025 AWP Intro Journal Awards winner, Merrick’s poetry appears in citizen trans* {project}, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Familiar by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (Madhouse Press 2024).
When least expected,
magic twines legs like
a cat. Or was it always
here, and by averting
eyes from the shadow,
I missed its shine? Or
did A strike it from my
flint-like limbs? Either
way,21 its song fills every
room, and I only have
to notice what catches
in my throat when
I lift voice in return.
____________ 21“It is not that something different is seen, but that one sees differently. It is as though the spatial act of seeing were changed by a new dimension,” Carl Jung.
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (she/her) is the author of Mud in Our Mouths(Northwestern University Press, 2025) and Look Alive (Cowles Poetry Book Prize, Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2021), along with numerous chapbooks, most recently Lossland (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press). Her poetry can be found in Ninth Letter, swamp pink, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQIA2S+ literary journal and press Foglifter. She was raised in the wilds of Tennessee and now lives in the SF Bay Area with her wife and rescue dog.
Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Familiar by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (Madhouse Press 2024).
The hag stands in moonlight
torn by its passage through
blinds. Resisting the urge to
wake A, who’ll say no one’s
here, I pull covers tighter as
she explains, she’s traveling
to when that boy led us into
the woods, hammered agate
until its bright guts showed.
She’ll stop him. I move to take
her hand18—one who was there,
though we barely remember,19
____________ 18 “The ‘night sea journey’ is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness,” Stephen Cope. 19 “The more adrenaline you secrete, the more precise your memory will be. But that is true only up to a certain point. Confronted with horror—especially the horror of ‘unescapable shock’—this system becomes overwhelmed and breaks down.”
but she steps back, just asks,
should she keep trying? I nod.
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (she/her) is the author of Mud in Our Mouths(Northwestern University Press, 2025) and Look Alive (Cowles Poetry Book Prize, Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2021), along with numerous chapbooks, most recently Lossland (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press). Her poetry can be found in Ninth Letter, swamp pink, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQIA2S+ literary journal and press Foglifter. She was raised in the wilds of Tennessee and now lives in the SF Bay Area with her wife and rescue dog.
Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.
This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Familiar by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (Madhouse Press 2024).
I dream a campfire ringed
with logs behind a now
derelict playground, and
at my feet, patent leather
shoes, curl of satin, child’s
dress.15 I lower each, watch
flames lick, obscure. Then
I see a woman, a stranger,
at the edge of the clearing.
But she’s gone when I look
again, so I claw ash to find
it all unburned—gleaming
leather, ribbon in a bow,
____________ 15 “Dissociation is the essence of trauma. The overwhelming experience is split off and fragmented, so that the emotions, sounds, images, thoughts, and physical sensations related to the trauma take on a life of their own.”
dress folded just as mom
set it out that day. Hands
wet now with tar, I wipe,
but it won’t budge.16 Then,
all at once, the forest starts
singing—cicada, owl, wind—
as I drag palms down my
nightgown, spreading dark.
____________ 16 “We are dealing with a dual reality, the reality of the relatively secure and predictable present that lives side by side with a ruinous, ever-present past.”
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (she/her) is the author of Mud in Our Mouths(Northwestern University Press, 2025) and Look Alive (Cowles Poetry Book Prize, Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2021), along with numerous chapbooks, most recently Lossland (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press). Her poetry can be found in Ninth Letter, swamp pink, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQIA2S+ literary journal and press Foglifter. She was raised in the wilds of Tennessee and now lives in the SF Bay Area with her wife and rescue dog.
Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.
