Sundress Announces the Third Episode of the New Podcast, Shitty First Drafts
Sundress Publications announces the third episode of a new podcast, Shitty First Drafts. A podcast made for and by writers, the show playfully investigates the creative processes of different artists to determine how a finished draft gets its polish.
In Episode 3, Alyssa Molina joins Stephanie Phillips and Brynn Martin to chat about her winding road to writing: from secret notebooks as a child, to discovering poetry on Tumblr, to writing fan fiction, to performing with Knoxville’s spoken word poetry collective, The 5th Woman, at Bonnaroo. Still in her undergrad at the University of Tennessee, Alyssa is a force both in the classroom and on the stage. After being empowered by other women of color, Alyssa started her career as a spoken word poet, saying, “I realized that the person I had most wanted to see on stage as a little girl was me.” The two pieces she shares on the podcast focus on the women in her family and her relationship with them. Though the poems were written almost 6 years apart—the first while she was still finding her voice in high school and the second for an assignment in a college poetry class—Alyssa discusses the ways that both navigate concerns of womanhood, family, culture, and voice.
Alyssa Molina is a Knoxville-based poet in her undergrad at the University of Tennessee studying creative writing. Alyssa was born and raised in Miami, “Little Havana,” FL, as her Cuban family says. Being first-generation American, she is profoundly inspired by the tenacity of her family’s immigration story, their will to survive, and her Hispanic culture. She was a traveling poet with The Fifth Woman in 2017–2018, performed at Bonnaroo, hosted three poetry workshops with Marilyn Kallet, Seed Lynn, and Knoxville poet and mentor Daje Morris. Alyssa defines happiness as bare feet, a cigar, and salsa dancing.
A 501(c)3 non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000, Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run press that publishes chapbooks and full-length collections in both print and digital formats, and hosts numerous literary journals, an online reading series, and the Best of the Net Anthology.
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