Meet Our New Intern: Kenli Doss

A deep passion for art has been at the forefront of my life for as long as I can remember. As a young girl, reading was my escape from a lack of popularity in school and food on the table at home. Books continue to offer a sense of safety for me via the enclosed worlds of print on paper even now, as my twenty-fifth birthday encroaches ever nearer. I’ve made a habit in my adult life of reading everything, not just books. Stories, poems, articles, captions, and even informational stickers are all free game in my ongoing love affair with words. I read SciShow and New York Times articles like they’re going out of style, and the end is nowhere in sight.

I remember the first play I ever read, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and I hated it. I was a high school freshman expected to understand Shakespeare’s nuanced themes and antiquated diction, but I failed to understand the point. It wasn’t until college, in fact, that two professors took special care to show me what I was missing. Under their tutelage, I fell in love with the Bard and began reading, writing, acting, and teaching about Shakespeare’s plays. This journey through literature sparked a longing in me that I never knew existed: to consume it all. I made it my mission to eat up every piece of writing the world has to offer, even the things I know I won’t agree with or enjoy reading, all for the sake of learning.

Today, I adhere to this idea of consumption as if it were my religion. I use others’ writings to make myself a more informed, diversified writer, and I’ve never felt more confident as an artist. I study the intersection of literature and other forms of art like painting and film, and I do it for fun!

This insistence on knowing everything motivates me to submit my writing and to continue doing so even when doubt and rejection whisper their nasty words into my ear. It’s what brought me here, to the Sundress family, and I have no doubt it will push me further into my life as a successful artist. I owe those professors, and myself, an abundance of gratitude for pushing me when I was glued to the floor, and everything I do is permeated with that gratitude even today, even tomorrow, and hopefully forever.

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Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.