The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: “Bright Power Dark Peace” by Traci Brimhall & Brynn Saito

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This selection comes from the poetry collection Bright Power Dark Peace, available from Diode Editions. Order your copy here.

Traci Brimhall is the author of three collections of poetry: Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award; and Saudade(forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press); as well as an illustrated children’s book, Sophia & The Boy Who Fell (Pleiades Press/SeedStar Books). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, she’s an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University and lives in Manhattan, KS.

Brynn Saito is the author of two books of poetry, Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her poetry has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She is the recipient of a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship and winner of the Key West Literary Seminar’s Scotti Merrill Memorial Award. Originally from Fresno, CA, Brynn teaches and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

librecht baker. Long Beach, CA native. Member of Dembrebrah West African Drum and Dance Ensemble. MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. VONA/Voices and Lambda Literary Writer Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow. Poetry is forthcoming in Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices (Trans-Genre Press) and is included in CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (MTv Books).