The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: My Own Strange Beast by Melissa Atkinson Mercer

This selection comes from the collection My Own Strange Beast, available from Porkbelly Press. Our curator for July is Tierney Bailey.

Tierney Bailey is a Libra, a lover of science fiction and poetry, and studies Korean in her spare time. Amongst her pursuits, Tierney is currently the production editor at Redivider Magazine and a copyeditor at Strange Horizons. As a graduate student at Emerson College, Tierney is studying publishing in the Writing and Publishing program. True to her Midwesterner roots, Tierney still smiles upon the slightest bit of eye contact, makes small talk in lines and elevators, and exclaims “ope!” with barely any provocation at all. If you can’t find her on a train somewhere between Providence and Boston, she can easily be found screaming into the void on Twitter as @ergotierney.

Melissa Atkinson Mercer is the author of the poetry collections Knock (Half Mystic Press, 2018) and Saint of the Partial Apology (Five Oaks Press, 2017) as well as five chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared in Moon City Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Yes, Poetry, and A Portrait in Blues: An Anthology of Identity, Gender, and Bodies, among others. She has an MFA from West Virginia University where she won the Russell MacDonald Creative Writing Award in Poetry. She currently works and teaches at Lees-McRae College.