Project Bookshelf: Reina Maiden-Navarro

Ten volunteers, thousands of books, one week. Every summer, I volunteered with my mom at my elementary school’s library. We catalogued, sleeved, and organized every single book before the upcoming school year. I spent hours removing marker stains from hardcovers, scraping stickers off of paperbacks, and taping the spines of new inventory. I learned how to care for books in the most literal and physical way.

Sometimes, I wish I could be the person who leaves annotations in my books, embracing a more lived-in library. However, those childhood summers ingrained in me the firm importance of prioritizing the longevity of my books, particularly for sharing them with friends and family members.

One of my most loved, most shared, and one with the most wear-and-tear, is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It’s a book that has served as a bridge between my nana and me in my early childhood. As I’ve gotten older, it’s become all the more precious. Two years ago, we even took a trip to Concord, Massachusetts, to visit the author’s home together.

My first copies of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins have been read the most times out of any book on my shelf. They are a huge indicator of the kind of books I adored in middle school and high school, and they’re still the books that make me want to make a career out of publishing the most.

In college, my bookshelf became peppered with a wide-array of genres.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is reflective of the kind of Gothic fiction that reminds me of my partner. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler finally gave me the vocabulary to describe my favorite subgenre as speculative fiction. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde grew my love for classic literature as I explored a minor in Creative Writing. Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner and many other memoirs got me through my study abroad program. Laura Horak’s Girls Will Be Boys paints a clear picture of the queer-focused lens that much of my undergraduate degree in Film & Media Studies centered on.

As my personal library expands, I’ll keep preserving, loving, and sharing my books. I hope to take this same care to my work with Sundress Publications as I support and contribute to the writing being published this season.

A white woman is standing in front of a tree in a grove. She has short, dark red hair. She is wearing a black dress with white trim and a blue graduation stole with the words "UC Irvine" embroidered on it with gold thread.

Reina Maiden-Navarro is an editor, writer, and photographer. She recently graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in Film & Media Studies and a minor in Creative Writing, cum laude. She also works as an Editor at Prompt and an Outreach Coordinator at Bookstr. If she is not reading or writing, she can be found traveling, painting, or baking cookies.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Is Is Enough by Lauren Camp

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from Is Is Enough by Lauren Camp (TRP: The University Press of SHSU 2026).

IF I TELL YOU HOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHY

Someone left a child’s red boot in the path.
Done with motion and arrivals, it makes me want
to make a list of trusts.
When I lived in Boston, I dated a bus driver.
We went to a club
where I handed over a fake ID
and the bouncer saw me, young
and soft, a plucked berry. He let me in, knowing
that night I might cloudburst
or underworld. The city was bearable with dirty
habits of snowbanks, tired streets, people at each corner
doubled beside beeches
holding up signs lettered Hope. I give
my coats to such suffering. Bus driver bought me a drink
orange with ice. He whispered.
I didn’t know what to do
with a man with a mustache. It’s ridiculous, the construction
of a memory. The club was dark
and smoky and full of decisions. I can’t say
I felt lucky. We left
to walk that old crisp night. Boston was ruined
with slippery weather. He was gentle,
didn’t touch me. Dwindling
flakes latched to the ground and I never saw him
again. One hour bent
to another. I had no armor.
I didn’t need a map to know where we were going.
And then days went on.
And here I am with the boot, with the desert,
the sun, me beside me in the perfect center
of reason which looks maybe
like nothing, but I call it trust.

Lauren Camp (she/her) is the author of eight previous collections, including In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. She served as New Mexico Poet Laureate from 2022-25 and founded the New Mexico Epic Poem Project. Honors include fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute, a Dorset Prize, a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

Ezra Fox (they/he) is a Best of the Net nominee who lives and writes in San Francisco, CA and holds an MFA from Indiana University. A Breadloaf, Tin House, and Lambda Literary Fellow, and recipient of the Lili Elbe Memorial Scholarship, which recognizes transgender writers of exceptional promise, their work appears or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, Interim, and elsewhere. Additionally, they won the 2025 West Trade Review Poetry Prize, and currently serve as assistant judge of the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Apart from writing, Ezra maintains a daily practice of reconnecting with their inner child: roller-skating, playing drums, and enjoying animated films and theme parks. In quieter moments, they can be found sharing cups of tea and sweet treats with their beloveds. Learn more about Ezra at ezrafox.net or on Instagram @ezraxfox.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Is Is Enough by Lauren Camp

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from Is Is Enough by Lauren Camp (TRP: The University Press of SHSU 2026).

PROGNOSIS

My father is all
at once. It is noon and widens
further into another
landscape of feet.
The words he uses are a measure
of the half-point
to silence. We listen
to the mirror on the wall
and my father is bent
down with
grizzle and returning
spaces. My father reminds me
of my father. Father
as conveyance, as legal
document, as night flight, lost
pitch. Next question. For something
to do, we name the body
by streaming daylight:
knee, nerve, stomach. Reason
the tender sound of sun. Name hope
as a pleasantry. We are spending
our time folded
into it, finding
ourselves. We are not
doing nothing. We are planning
the task of letting go
of all thought and my father is root
and tree. I put my hand
on his hand
and build a small
mountain. I haven’t described
his voice. An hour passes again.
A sound not said. A negative

ghost. A rain
unbuckles the leaves.
Perhaps we’ll look
in the mirror and see
what just happened—
what I mean
is, the future.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Is Is Enough by Lauren Camp

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from Is Is Enough by Lauren Camp (TRP: The University Press of SHSU 2026).

SANCTUARY

I collect another phrase
for safekeeping. No need to do more
than hold his fragrance: egg, anger, each thick
river of rejoicing. On my fridge, a scrap
of my father, his perfect print
which held all the black of a day
and its losses. Now he learns the equation
for why I tell him this beginning.
From the first morning of my childhood
when he lifted me up, with iron
in his body and my apple-sized eyes. My father,
I looked giddy and exhaled.
That was Sunday. The village. I was a baby sugared
with indulgence. Fat and black-haired. Those years
of his unfolding wallet and the ongoing thorn
of origin. We knocked on the heavens
with our knees. Such boredom.
These days, the body holds its heat.
We begin with my name: a portrait of belonging.
We pantomime conversation.
I never want to feel ore than I do. No,
it isn’t that. Twitching all night again. Is his presence more
of a parting or a start? My father.
I separate each hollow. I always knew
four months of snow. We bought sweaters,
he tested my algebraic solutions, my mother danced
in our hotel rooms. Her arms were pale.
If train A and train B are traveling at different speeds
from two different cities
what is the time before collision? My father.
I am not looking for a way out.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Is Is Enough by Lauren Camp

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from Is Is Enough by Lauren Camp (TRP: The University Press of SHSU 2026).

ON HARMONY

Train stops and eggplant and the grim little sun and our clapping
all morning and later we slicked down to righteous
dance moves, pink greasy boxes of dough. Some would say

we were not divine between us but we hummed our shared holy
family in a quarry of folding chairs. One hour skimmed
to another and they were not forbidden, or clarified

with reason, but the ache of the olives and responses
rendered in timbal, qanun, tarub, the oud, and the sounds again
of distress and truth. Darwish said “Nothing is harder…than the smell

of dreams while they’re evaporating.” On those days we dressed
in our blacks and thick tongues, and the narrative
we offered was not an acceptance, a raging. We wanted to forget

to kneel. We spent the days linked to our divisions
of oppression and we fixed to the matter
of beginning. Every thought claimed five wounds. Dresses loose

with their fine threads, red and lime,
wheat gold. Outside, a stone bridge watched the great river
weeping; a mother sang to her baby. My taste in the mouth

of this crowd. Habibi, our losses, and the most of us rustling
our arrows beneath them. Five times a day we ate the oily
sweetness with our vigorous fingers, our tongues moving to cumin

and cream, and we passed from news to a chapel
of pita, to portions of dusk, our ghosts and marginal angers.
I took 48 photos of shadows in quick succession,

thinking one better than another, and saw in each photo
a lapse to spot evidence. I deleted them
from my memory which wanted not to hunger

for these compulsions, statistics. We were taught
so many instances to doubt, but the light came along
singing and we joined it, taking its melody as a apology.

Project Bookshelf: Greyson Finch

When I was a kid, my mom taught me the importance of books. As a published author and a single mother working full time at a small-town newspaper, she knew the value of the written word. And I grew to love them. She got me a bookshelf, painted the outside purple and the inside green. By the time I was six, it was filled to the brim with books. Chapter books, picture books, pop up books. Something of nearly every genre and age range. The shelves sagged under the weight of thousands of words. That same shelf now sits in my kid sister’s room, filled with different books, but the same weight.

When I was in my teens, I outgrew that tiny bookshelf. My books were longer, heavier. They would no longer fit. So, for Yule one year, my parents bought me a large black-and-silver bookshelf. One with enough space to fit all of my books and my trinkets. I reorganized that shelf a hundred times while I had it. Sometimes alphabetically by author last name, sometimes rainbow order. But it was always full. Fantasy, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and every story I could get my hands on. I think that’s what made me love writing so much. Reading stories by so many people about so many things. Every time a book made me cry, I found myself desperate to recreate that feeling in my own writing.

At twenty-one, I moved out of Oklahoma and up to Virginia. I packed all of my belongings into my tiny 2007 two-door Honda civic and drove across the country in two days. However, in order to do that, I had to get rid of as much of my stuff as I could. I sold or donated almost every book that I owned. The only ones I kept were either a part of my religious practice, or books I was in the middle of. Once I got to Virginia, I got sucked under the wave of my life. I was a full time college student working as much as I could to get some money.

I finally started reading again when I decided to switch my major to poetry. It was the best decision I’ve ever made. They say there’s no money in poetry. I don’t believe that. But, even if I did, I wouldn’t care. Even if poetry couldn’t keep my stomach fed, it nourishes my soul. Now, my bookshelf has a total of twelve books. Norse and Greek mythology for my religious practice, several fantasy books, and a handful of poetry books that I’ve annotated a little too much.

I’ll work on growing my collection again when I have an actual bookshelf to grow it on. But, for now, I like my small anthology of myth, magic, and poetry.

Greyson Finch (he/him) is a poet from Oklahoma. Throughout his life, he’s struggled with his mental health and childhood trauma while also growing up queer in the South. He uses that to write pieces that speak to the soul. Pieces that people like him can read to know they’re not alone. He’s been published in The Bloomin’ Onion and Wingless Dreamer. He can be found on twitter at @Greyson_Finch77 and Instagram at @greysonfinchwrites

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest (The University of Nebraska Press 2025).

Because Memory, I Am Told, Is Unreliable—

Lie, just a little, about the color of the grass, the quality of sky,
the air and whether it is breathable. For instance

that house across the street is not broken down yet,
its sockets retaining the same panes of glass it was born with

just like the eyes we keep forever if we can—aging,
but the same. Tell me it isn’t February and colder

than usual. Don’t explain to my soul beauty;
I don’t want to know. I want to believe that this small town

is a place I’d stay forever. That the men
smoking outside of the halfway house don’t scare me much—

or intrigue me some because I am also halfway.
That after years of being named the offender by my abuser

[the man from whom I’m still running], I’m not confused
concerning the snow falling today and whether

it is desirable for its whiteness and coolness on my face,
or if I am tired of its falling. I only know how long

I’ve been tumbling into grief and too many questions—
a disassociation from every present moment into an obscure past.

The house across the street invites workers for remodeling;
the coffee shop in town makes breakfast sandwiches I like.

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.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest (The University of Nebraska Press 2025).

How to Forgive the Predator

All living things must eat.
The stomach is not impartial; neither

the soul. We survive
by what we do and do not nurture,

and sometimes this requires teeth.
I say to my son, Don’t incise

the soft part of your heart.
But he does,

creating a scar—each time toughening,
each time making the tissue

less susceptible to pain. When I got
divorced I learned quickly

that this is what made me desirable
for eating, having been broke down

by a mallet, my husband’s
hammering anger tenderizing me.

Having forgotten pain.
Having learned not to squeal

in a cage but continue to release
the lactic acid that keeps the slaughter

from spoiling. My son
teaches himself to forget pain too

in the same house, on the same street,
with the same sort of fleshly

cravings, a little indifference
to break down his appetite for love.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest (The University of Nebraska Press 2025).

Taxonomy

There is a way to say a name in the present
that changes the way you say that name in its future,
like the way my own name
and my mother’s name
became both blessing and curse
in the mouths of the men that spoke them.
When I first left my home
two years after divorcing my husband,
two years before my son’s graduation,
and three years before my daughter wrote the poems
that would break me,
I said my daughter’s name to the breeze,
then my son’s name while standing by a river
in New Hampshire feeling finally free, not feeling
the names like blessing or curse,
or anything so weighty. Only
their inscription in the earth of the journey that carried me,
as if I was sure they could hear me,
as if to declare: Mother is alive. Follow.
As if I didn’t know I was leaving.
As if I really thought they’d come running behind,
waving their arms with joy.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ezra Fox, is from Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest (The University of Nebraska Press 2025).

I Wanted to be a Boy

because I want to be a wolf; because the earth smells
of sinew and green. Because his hair was made of corn dust
and cloud, and I wanted to weave it around me, trust
his sky. Because Eros did not strike my thigh or breast;
instead he plunged knives into my chest and kept the heart
beating. Because lunge is so similar to lung, both
attempting a breath. Because I was breathing
when my mother bore me, and this was written down
on a chart next to the names of other living things—
and some of them were masculine; because this was not
a female breath. Because it took years to tame my teeth,
and still I try to use them; because they are pretty. Because
I feel like thunder often, dance like snow; because
I am living. Because his arms were made of roots,
and I wanted to trust cultivation. Because the sky tastes
of lilac and honey; because I am breathing because its wound
has made more room inside my chest. Because I lunged
when hungry and almost used my teeth; because
a body seems heavier after it’s dead, even though it isn’t.
You can heft its corpse anywhere without cooperation
if you have the stamina. If you’re big and strong enough.

The Sundress Blog

Project Bookshelf: Reina Maiden-Navarro

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Project Bookshelf: Greyson Finch

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