The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Writing the Women We Were Warned About: Monstrous Feminine and Superstition in Poetry,” a workshop led by Ariadne Makridakis Arroyo on Wednesday, March 11th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: SAFTA).
Superstitions shape the way we learn about danger, identity, and belonging, but they also tell us who we’re allowed to be. In this generative poetry workshop, we’ll explore the stories and sayings we grew up with: from playful warnings to cultural myths meant to guide or socially condition us. We’ll focus on Latin American monstrous women like La Siguanaba and La Ciguapa, specifically on their folklore and their defiance of gender expectations. What happens when you become the woman you’ve been warned about?
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to via PayPal: ariadnemakridakis@gmail.com
Born and raised by Greek and Guatemalan immigrants, Ariadne Makridakis Arroyo is a Los Angeles-based writer, arts administrator, and feminista who grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. Their work has been featured in Stellium Literary Magazine, Stonecoast Review, Latin@ Literatures, Tasteful Rude, and Acentos Review. In 2023, they were awarded a speculative fiction fellowship with Roots. Wounds. Words. and were named the 2025 LGBTQIA+ residency fellow with the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Currently, Ariadne’s work centers queer, feminist, and Latine perspectives in a way that explores the crossroads of radical joy, sexuality, brujería, and ancestral healing.
I tend to view myself in phases of my life: the little girl, too full of curiosity and oddly shaped clothes. The preteen who is suddenly, deeply aware of the fact that she exists in this world and other people can see her. The teen who shrunk quite like Alice did when she drank the bottle labeled “drink me” and cried herself into something that can fit through a keyhole or door’s mouth. The sickly 21-year-old celebrating legality with a new medication infusion instead of sugared-up vodka. The now adult who wants to believe she finally is figuring things out, but has found that the version she wishes to be is still quite the opposite of the soft spoken sweet silhouette of a body that my brain follows around.
There are a lot of labels I can fit myself into. I am an INFJ. I am a Libra. I’m an Enneagram 4w5. I love taking obscure personality quizzes that give me even more labels. I think it’s because I’m still figuring out how I perceive myself. Maybe I can’t quite tell you who I am, but I can tell you what is real about my life and my death.
I am going to die. Well, my liver is. But technically speaking yours will too. We all die. But when I was fifteen I was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease called Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis. A mouth full, I know. It’s PSC for short, and while I could use this space to write an academic paper on the medical ins and outs of this disease, all that really matters is there’s no cure, no treatment, and it kills. It’s been hard not to let something so massively life changing not leak into every aspect of my identity. I am a woman, and I am sick. I am a student, and I am ill. I am a daughter, and I have to be cared for. I am a girlfriend, and I feel like a burden. Everywhere I turn there is a reflection that says I am dying a lot faster than you are.
Being diagnosed with such a scary illness makes an existentialism speed-run quite possible in a few short years. Who am I if I am not alive? What do I want to do for a living? What is the purpose of working towards anything if I might not live to see the fulfillment of it? Does my cat love me the way I love him? What is the point of writing these words for you to read? What is writing? How much longer do I have left? How is my brain reading and writing at the same time? When is my next dose? My next doctor’s appointment?
This line of dreadful thinking is just as degenerative as my disease state. I didn’t want to become a victim to my illness. I know I will die, but so will all of us. The real victory is not letting it destroy and consume what I have left of life. After my parents’ divorce, I found myself more motivated than ever to become something greater than the damaged goods my body left me in. So who am I if not this sick girl?
I’m not quite sure if I should explain what I want to be, what I think I am, who my peers see me as, my Mom’s opinion that makes me, her “tweet pea,” out to be a princess with a sword and book in hand. (Hi, Mom. I know you’re reading this, I love you.) Or maybe my Dad’s version of me that probably includes the words “demonic” “disrespectful” and or “evil”. (Yes, unfortunately, I’m so serious. And no, don’t worry, I am not in contact with him.) What do they say? Everyone is the villain in someone else’s story? Something like that. I think somehow I am all of these versions of myself. I’m still the little girl with her ducky blanky. I am still the boyish kid running to catch up to my older brother and his friends. I am most definitely the very strange child who proudly wore the shirt with a puffy paint drawing of her cat wearing a crown like everyday of fifth grade. I am a teacher to small children and also a student myself. I am quite the introvert, but I get very bold and very loud when I feel that anyone might need me or there is even the slightest sort of injustice. I am always looking for something new to learn about. I still love cats. I am chronically ill, and I am going to die. But since I am still here, you must endure these words. It is a privilege to even be able to consider what I am and how you might think of me. Therefore, I would like to reduce myself to the only thing which allows me to be all of this: alive.
Abigail Palmer (she/her) is a current English student at the University of Tennessee. Born in the north but raised in the south, she has always had a place in the in-between of things. In between reader and writer, student and teacher, chronically ill and healthy–she is seeking to defy such labels to become whoever, wherever, however she desires to be. That currently looks like a preschool teacher, beloved (of course) daughter, adored (obviously) girlfriend, up-and-coming cat mom, and a forever nominee of the “Super Opinionated” award. If she’s not incessantly analyzing every piece of media she consumes, she’s probably intellectualizing her feelings while making ultra specific playlists that no one can relate to but her! You can find her on Instagram @zer0cooll.
Are you looking to submit your latest poem, piece of fiction or nonfiction, or artwork to one of the exceptional undergraduate journals in the country? Look no further than the following list!
30 North is the national undergraduate literary journal of North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. 30 North publishes undergraduate poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and artwork in their annual print journal. They also publish author interviews and reviews conducted and written by their staff online. Currently taking submissions!
The Albion Review is a national undergraduate literary journal based out of Albion College in Albion, Michigan. The Review publishes works of short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and visual art on an annual basis. Submissions currently closed.
Applause is a national literary arts and culture magazine housed at the University of Arkansas -Fort Smith open for submissions from undergraduates around the world. They publish poetry, fiction, essays, and art. Submissions for Spring 2026 close February 16, 2026!
The Blank Quill is a digital literary magazine focused on platforming BIPOC and LGBTQ+ writers. Submissions for Spring 2026 issue close February 28, 2026!
The Blue Route is an international literary journal for undergraduate writers based out of Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. They publish works of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and artwork biannually. Currently closed for submissions, next submission window will open in August.
Collision Literary Magazine is an international literary journal for undergraduate writers and is housed at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They publish works of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and artwork annually. Submissions close February 15, 2026!
Dark River Review is the national undergraduate literary journal of Alabama State University in Montgomery, Alabama. They publish works of short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and visual art on an annual basis. Currently accepting submissions!
Echo Review is a literary magazine devoted to history, whether that be a past relative or the Napoleonic wars. The are a proud champion of young, marginalized, and otherwise systematically disadvantaged writers. While history has a tendency to favor certain groups over others, Echo takes great pride in being an active advocate in closing these gaps. Currently closed for submissions.
Eclipse is a literary magazine that celebrates the power of creativity in all its forms, including visual art, prose, poetry, essays, and music. Our mission is to showcase user submissions in a space where diverse voices and artistic expression can shine. Whether through words or images, we aim to foster a community that values and uplifts creativity in all its depths. Currently accepting submissions!
Equinox Literary Magazine is a national undergraduate literary magazine based out of the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, Arkansas. They publish works of fiction, poetry, hybrid writing, short screenplays, and visual art annually. They also host the David Jauss Fiction Prize and the Jo McDougall Poetry Prize each year. Currently accepting submissions!
Furrow is the national undergraduate literary journal of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They publish a print issue each spring and feature new work on their website regularly. They accept unpublished poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art, and comics. Submissions close February 27, 2026.
Glass Mountain is an undergraduate literary journal at the University of Houston in Houston, Texas. They accept previously unpublished fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, art, and everything in between on an annual basis. Currently accepting submissions!
Green Blotter Literary Magazine is a literary magazine produced by undergraduate students at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania. They publish works of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and artwork on an annual basis. Currently accepting submissions!
Inscape is an international literary magazine published at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. They publish unpublished fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and visual art annually. Submissions will reopen on August 1, 2026.
The Kudzu Review is the national undergraduate literary journal of Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. The Review publishes works of short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and visual art biannually. Accepting submissions until March 27, 2026!
Mistake House is Principia College’s digital literary journal for students and professional writers and artists. Based in Elsah, Illinois, they publish works of poetry, fiction, and artwork on an annual basis. Mistake House also offers three Editor’s Prizes of $100 each year: one for fiction, one for poetry, and one for photography. Submissions open until March 15, 2026.
Mosaic is the University of California, Riverside’s undergraduate literary journal. In 1959, Mosaic began as a small group of poets, and they’re still going strong nearly 60 years later, having expanded into a home for all writers, musicians, and artists. They are completely undergraduate-run, and publish one volume of prose, poetry, and art every year. Currently taking submissions!
Outrageous Fortune is the first online literary magazine created for undergraduates by undergraduates. Based out of Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia, Outrageous Fortune publishes works of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, film, and visual art in their issues. Currently taking submissions! The deadline to submit for Volume 16 is March 31, 2026.
Polaris Literary Magazine is the national undergraduate journal of arts and literature at Ohio Northern University located in Ada, Ohio. They publish works of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and visual art on an annual basis. Currently closed for submissions.
Prairie Margins is a national undergraduate literary journal based out of Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. Prairie Margins publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, art, and photography. Currently taking submissions!
Red Cedar Review is the longest-running undergraduate publication in the United States. Housed at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, Red Cedar Review publishes works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art every two years. Accepting submissions August 1st – October 15th, 2026.
Runestone is a national undergraduate literary journal housed at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. They accept unpublished works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and digital storytelling. Accepting submissions April 1st – October 1st of each year.
Sink Hollow is an international undergraduate literary magazine based out of Utah State University in Logan, Utah. They publish works of fiction, poetry, hybrid writing, short screenplays, and visual art annually. Submissions areopen until March 31, 2026!
Short Vine is the international undergraduate literary journal of the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio. They publish works of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and photography on an annual basis. Currently closed for submissions.
Violet Marginz, formerly The Alchemist Review, is a national undergraduate literary journal from the University of Illinois-Springfield. They publish prose, creative nonfiction, translation, poetry, and visual arts annually. Submissions close February 20, 2026.
Quirk is the Literary and Visual Arts journal of the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. They are entirely run by student-editors seeking to give artists a creative outlet to showcase their talents on a national scale. They are looking for originality and authenticity: poets, creative writers, and visual artists. Currently closed to submissions, will reopen again in Spring 2026.
The Oakland Arts Review is an international undergraduate literary and arts journal out of Oakland University in Rochester Hills, Michigan. Their ambition is to become one of the most prominent literary journals publishing undergraduate writers throughout the world. Currently taking submissions!
The Allegheny Review, in print since 1983, is the oldest national undergraduate literary magazine in the United States dedicated exclusively to undergraduate works of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction. Published annually, the periodical showcases some of the best literature the nation’s undergraduates have to offer. The magazine is and always has been edited and produced by students at Allegheny College. The Allegheny Review considers submissions from undergraduate writers year-round. Currently taking submissions!
Established in 1974 and named for the Sucarnochee River that runs near the University of West Alabama, The Sucarnochee Review is published annually by the University’s Department of English and History. They are student-led and student-edited and believe strongly in the value of amplifying student voices. They accept submissions year round. Currently taking submissions!
The Tower is a student-run literary magazine at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. They publish fiction, nonfiction, poetry, visual art, and hybrid works. Their annual print edition comes out in the spring, and they accept submissions in the fall of every year. Currently closed for submissions.
Right from the first page of Roseanne Freed’s Your Name Is a Poem (Picture Show Press, 2024), the theme of motherhood takes over the page, as does the importance of names. This poetry collection is written from the point of view of a parent and the grief process of losing their child to cancer. Freed captures the full arc of motherhood, from the joy of naming a child to the ache of loving and letting go. Centered around a daughter named Mahalia, the poems explores motherly devotion, identity, sibling relationships, and family resilience. Throughout these poems, we readers see the mother trying to grasp any piece of her daughter in all of the memories that she has with her, starting from childbirth and as she grew older.
The first poem, also the title poem, gives readers a first glimpse of the daughter and the power that the name Mahalia holds for the Freed: “Before you were born, / I knew you were someone special / and needed a unique name; / there are too many girls called / Jennifer, Jessica, or Jane” (Freed 1). As we continue to read, the poem “Our Time Together, Too Short” reads like a lyrical biography, tracing Mahalia’s growth from a baby to a selfless adult. Mahalia’s choice to bike to chemotherapy appointments shows readers her strength and values. The final line, “I loved her even when I didn’t love her” (Freed 5), encapsulates the various elements of parenting: unconditional love, complex emotions, and the pain of watching a child suffer. Freed includes bits of her memories with her daughter right from the moment she gave birth:
“My sweet Mahalia, born after two days labor
with all those lucky sevens—
17/7/78 at 7:07 pm weighing 7 lbs. 7 oz
the baby who grew fat and healthy
nursing at my breast for a whole year,
the one-year-old
who crawled into the fridge
to get at the pickles and olives,
but didn’t care for cake, or candy…” (Freed 4)
From these memories that the speaker decides to share with us, we learn about Mahalia’s experiences through the mother’s lens, the emotions she goes through and how she must keep herself together for her daughter’s sake.
Different from the previous poems, “A Fearful Thing” shifts the voice to second person, as if Freed is speaking directly to her daughter. In doing so, Freed uses “you” to capture the last conversation that mother and daughter had together before Mahalia passes. Food tends to be a source of comfort during times of grief and struggle. The mother is holding onto this last moment by using a bowl of lentil soup, a dish that now holds such deep meaning. The first stanza of the poem illustrates the warmness of food and how it brings this family together as the speaker says, “A pot of my lentil soup, / our staple meal through the Canadian / winters of your childhood” (Freed 10). In the last stanzas of this poem, Freed writes:
“I sent you a text:
We’re eating soup in your bowls.
Mine has pink hearts.
You replied immediately.
I miss eating.
That was your last message to me.
You died the next day.” (Freed 11)
The poetic voice is that of someone who has loved deeply and is now left with the unbearable silence after goodbye. A theme that stuck out to me in this poem is the simplicity of soup. Freed begins “A Fearful Thing” with the line, “Soup, I thought…” (10). This leap from diagnosis to the feeling of home, thinking of soup, encapsulates a mother’s instinct to comfort, nourish, and do something. The lentil soup, which is a staple from childhood, becomes a symbol of continuity, maternal love, and later, unspoken resentment.
In Your Name Is a Poem, we see a pain that the daughter projects onto her mother through anger. In the poem, “A Week After She Left Us My Therapist Told Me,” the mother seeks help to grieve through her daughter’s loss, but still her daughter’s pain and range from her battle of cancer still finds ways to show up in this grieving process. This poem is shorter compared to the other ones but holds a lot of power. The poem’s length directly mirrors the emotional state of the speaker: raw, constrained, and filled with unresolved tension, each word having weight. The mother/speaker finds it difficult to experience the emotions that she has as she mentions: “If I allow myself to weep, / I hear her— // Stop making it about you” (Freed 18). Since Freed decides to add dialogue, reflecting something Mahalia might have said, the choice of words mirror an upset tone that her daughter would have expressed. Her voice echoes in this poem; even if it’s only projected through Freed, it’s now embedded so deeply that she controls her own grief.
Your Name is a Poem is touching, captivating and filled with different phases of emotions. Freed shares vulnerable moments with the reader during and after her daughter’s battle with cancer. Within this collection, we get a glimpse of what her family went through; we still feel Freed’s intense reality across 35 pages of poetry.
Angela Çene is a poet, raised Massachusetts by two Albanian Immigrants. She enjoys writing about the body, & how it relates to the world & our experiences. After earning her Bachelors in Writing, Literature & Publishing from Emerson College, she is currently preparing to apply to law schools. Angela enjoys traveling & finding new restaurants.
I’ve always been drawn to instruction manuals. Aside from reading chapter books in elementary school, I was pulling how-to guides and building manuals off the shelves, because I was always fascinated by the idea of creating something through careful consumption. I would read books about taking care of animals like bunnies and making crafts, because I really love personalizing everything I own! I used to volunteer to organize the classroom bookshelves during recess, not because I was particularly neat, but because I loved the logic of categorization, which is something I still do today with my book notes!
My reading tastes have expanded since then, but that early love of structure and process never left me. In middle school, I fell head over heels for Tom Sawyer. I loved his free-spirited adventures and go-lucky optimism, as compared to Huck Finn’s solemn disposition (which was justified). In high school, I read many of John Steinbeck’s books, so I challenged myself to read East of Eden for English class, finding it one of the driest things I’d ever encountered. Years later however, I still think about that book constantly. I also read The Kite Runner, which didn’t fully resonate with me at the time in terms of writing style (it is still one of the saddest books I’ve read aside from A Thousand Splendid Suns), but has profoundly shaped what I want to write about now.
My current reading habits reflect this evolution. I’m voracious about memoirs, feminist theory, author diaries, and literary novels. My favorite nonfiction book is The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, and my favorite novel is Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, which is a book that changed how I think about searching for meaning in an often overwhelming and pretentious world.
What drew me to editing rather than purely creative writing was the collaborative process. Writing can be solitary, but editing is inherently relational. You’re working with someone to help them tell their story better, clearer, more powerfully. There’s something beautiful about that partnership, and about learning from other writers while helping shape their work.
I’ve spent time working with literary magazines, most recently focused on flash fiction and short poetry, but I’ve realized my heart is in longer-form work. I want to help bring full-length books, chapbooks, and novellas into the world. That’s what drew me to Sundress Publications! As a nonprofit press committed to amplifying diverse voices and creating space for work that might not fit traditional publishing models, Sundress aligns perfectly with where I want to grow as an editor!
I’m also passionate about amplifying perspectives from women, asexual voices, and religious backgrounds, which are communities whose stories deserve more space in contemporary literature. My editorial interests center on literary fiction, memoir, and nonfiction exploring history, technology, media studies, feminism, and literature itself.
When I’m not working on manuscripts, you can find me indoor climbing, drawing, learning Japanese, or adding to my ever-growing collection of shoujo and josei manga. I recently started a blog about women’s comics and just wrapped up a manga archival project that I hope to continue later in life!
I’m thrilled to join the Sundress team and can’t wait to learn from this incredible community of writers, editors, and book lovers. Here’s to making wonderful books together!
Franchesca Nicole Lazaro is an emerging editor with a passion for developmental editing and book production. She previously worked with Brink Literary Project and currently works with Tulipwood Press. Her editorial interests center on amplifying perspectives from women, asexual voices, and religious backgrounds, particularly in literary fiction, memoir, and nonfiction that explores feminism, history, technology, and media studies. She is learning Japanese and maintains a blog on women’s comics and reading. Franchesca is relocating from Seattle, Washington, to San Jose, California.
Spanning decades and relationships, dream worlds and memories and therapy sessions, Jill Khoury’s soaring, elegiac collection earthwork (Switchback Books, 2024) invites readers into the volatile and immersive experience of grieving someone both beloved and dangerous. In Khoury’s case, that person is her mother, to whom this collection is dedicated. Through three sections, the speaker reckons with her childhood, adulthood, and the aftermath of her mother’s death. The collection is grounded in her mental return to this figure, both mythically large and emaciated in her mental and physical illness, still looming over the speaker’s days, nights, and conception of herself.
The collection begins with a prelude entitled night cultivars, in which the speaker as a child immediately demonstrates her lyric and material superpower: that of unceasing observation, dismissed by her mother. The speaker describes how,
“the fractured
clay dirt
flowered
against a red
moon
bore a
scratchblossom
all thorns
and dolor
moaned from out
a low stump
when I put my ear
to it
oh
she says
that’s just
a weed
the wind.” (Khoury 1)
Quickly, the speaker gives the reader a medley of snippets illustrating fraught exchanges with her mother and the instability of their relationship. She remembers her mother in vignettes of mental decay: she flushes her meds, ceases to eat, doesn’t want her daughter to come visit her even as she says: “my mother’s whisper i would never do anything to hurt you / but this like so many of her communiques is a secret wrapped in a half-truth” (Khoury 5).
Even in the anger sparked from this neglect, the speaker’s care for her mother transforms, but does not cease: in one poem she burns her mother’s old clothes; the next, she remarks on how,
“she is
so smaller
i just want
to hold her” (Khoury 13).
This angry tenderness and ebbing and flowing despair sucks the reader into the speaker’s complex, fearless voice with abandon.
The speaker, understandably, seeks an escape away from the all-encompassing presence of her mother, and finds it in her dreams. A motif that permeates this collection is the phrase “all aspects of the dream are aspects of the dreamer”; four poems spanning the collection bear this same title. Early on in earthwork, the speaker remembers one such dream about her mother’s mental and physical deterioration in spine-crawlingly visceral detail: “my mother is perched on the couch dying properly wrapped / like a molebeast in a baby blue blanket” (Khoury 18). She is jolted back to the present when “[her] therapist asks [her] what does dying properly mean” Khoury (18). As the daughter of a palliative care physician, I was struck by moments like these that paralleled end-of-life care. The speaker’s therapist, here, asks the foundational question of palliative care: how does one die well? And in exploring someone’s values at the end of their life, the question very quickly becomes, how does one live well? Khoury delves into this query from multiple vantage points in this collection, leaving no lead unturned as she studies her chronic illness, mental health, and survivorship of abuse along with her complicated relationship with her mother.
Through all this pain and mourning, the speaker has moments that elucidate an awareness of their own resilience – the strength needed to continue living with, and in spite of, her trauma. Khoury counters a fight brewing with her mother, who compares her garden to kindling, by asserting, “i know something about surviving fire” (39). The dream motif continues as the speaker chooses to enter her mother’s bedroom in a dream, reminding herself: “it is important to remember / i choose this in dreams you are the chooser / you have the control” (Khoury 52). Her dreams, like her poetry, like her garden, become her sanctuaries, and in this the speaker illuminates a myriad of sites of refuge from the harm she’s experienced.
In Part Three, Khoury wrenches the reader from graphic descriptions of the past to an immediately more factual tone in the present. The section’s opening poem begins, “i delivered the eulogy / otherwise she would not have had a eulogy” (47). She continues to describe, with a clear numbness of immediate grief, the barebones of transpired events: her mother’s clothes were “bagged donated / to a rural church” (Khoury 48); she leaves a voicemail matter-of-factly informing her mother that she “tried to end [herself] / with antipsychotics / & alcohol” (Khoury 49). Pivotally, too, in Part Three the speaker meets her past self instead of becoming her in memory. Rather than absorbing the self-loathing and hurt her younger self was forced to endure, the speaker bids her own goodbyes to her mother and, “[takes] the knife from [her] belt to extract / the image of the child who sits in [her] mother’s lap” (Khoury 63).
This book is not just about grief or trauma, but also where this long-lasting pain settles to live within our bodies. Khoury repeatedly reckons with what it means to relive your past with such vividness that it becomes difficult to differentiate where your memories end and the present begins. Like many memories of trauma, they sometimes cease to be memories at all, and become just a different kind of embodied experience re-lived intermittently. As the speaker describes in the present-tense an afternoon lying beside her mother on a beach, she interrupts her speech to chastise and remind herself:
“no
none of this
is happening
this happened
long ago
far away.” (Khoury 65)
By beginning to create some form of distance between her past and current self, the speaker shows us how she is able to come home to her present body.
The collection’s title, earthwork, betrays one of the speaker’s central coping strategies; noticing and nurturing the earth, a place she understands when nothing else makes sense. After a suicide attempt, she relates the difficulty in returning back to school:
“i can’t remember
the difference between
dactyl and anapest
been painting
a lot though
mostly abstracts
bees dance on the honeycomb
of my tongue
so many secrets
sickle
in my closed
mouth.” (Khoury 62)
Khoury makes sense of her turbulent world with natural imagery, as she seeks for an escape in her suicidality and encounters a different spiritual response: “i ask god to erase me please / he wants me to macerate these herbs instead / light stratifies into color” (56-57). Nature and gardens, here, become sites of creation to rival the speaker’s instinct towards self-hate and destruction. One of Khoury’s most astounding poetic talents is her ability to turn a violent verb like “macerate” to something reclamatory in the space of just a few lines. Nature rebuilds when it is destroyed, and herbs, macerated, have even more of a capacity to heal in their transformed state.
In earthwork, Jillian Khoury dives into complex and living trauma, both experienced and inherited. Through it all, she retains tenderness for the mother who both raised her and harmed her, bending over backwards to attempt to understand her in memory as she did in life. This collection’s generous meditations on generational trauma will stay with me long after closing its pale-blue cover; at turns gentle, rageful, and vastly melancholic. Khoury encapsulated this range of the mixed bag we inherit from those who have loved and harmed us as she remembers her mother: “she hands me a box of her favorite earrings / some of these are tarnished” (8).
Catie Macauley (they/he/she) is a transmasculine aspiring poet living and working in Boston. They study Sociology, Environmental Studies, and English at Wellesley College, where they also compete on the Wellesley Whiptails frisbee team and perform with the Wellesley Shakespeare Society. A Best of the Net 2024 Nominee, his writing has appeared in brawl lit, The Wellesley News, and the Young Writer’s Project, among other publications. In their free time, Catie enjoys boxing, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and buying far too many books at independent bookstores – primarily the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where they are somehow lucky enough to work.
For a long time, I was told my writing was “proficient.” Not good, not even okay, but proficient. In fact, every single one of my papers was marked with this word in a large red scrawl.
You see, my elementary school had a rather peculiar grading scale. It looked something like this:
A: Advanced (90–100%)
P: Proficient (80–89%)
B: Basic (70–79%)
BB: Below Basic (60–69%)
F: Failed (0–59%)
More than anything, I wanted to be an advanced writer. The words almost sparkled to me. My teachers never had anything bad to say, always praising my competency and citing my growth, but it never felt like I was good enough. Looking back, I now understand. I was primarily raised by my deaf and Spanish-speaking mother. While she always reinforced my reading habit, communicating my own thoughts in words and constructing my own sentences in English hadn’t always come easily to me.
In my last year of elementary school, I finally received my first-ever “advanced” on a paper about Rosa Parks. My teacher, Ms. Brace, said it was the first time she heard my “voice” in an essay.
Throughout my life, I’ve fallen in and out of love with the written word, but the whole time, I’ve learned to lead with my voice by imbuing my passion into my writing.
On the first floor of the Ayala Science Library at UC Irvine, I became an advanced writer professionally. For two years, I worked at my university’s writing center, serving as both a Writing Tutor and a Community Outreach Coordinator. It was the best part of my college experience. I met with hundreds of peers, many of whom were first-generation or international students. We bonded over language barriers and cultural storytelling. My favorite part was seeing the growth of my repeat students experienced over the course of a quarter or a year as they came into their identity as new writers. I finally understood what Ms. Brace meant about using my voice. I tried to help others do the same.
This passion for ushering in the stories of underrepresented writers is what led me to Sundress Publications. As I begin my role as an Editorial Intern, I hope to continue to use my story to connect with readers and find common ground with the authors I work with.
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.
With the upcoming release of their debut poetry collection, Burns, SG Huerta spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Emma Goss about their poetic choices, pushing the limits of both English and Spanish in their poems, and the significance of memory, humor, and pain, in addition to what decolonialism means to them as a queer, nonbinary writer.
Emma Goss: How is repetition used as a rhetoric for pain in your collection?
SG Huerta: My use of repetition can represent rumination or perhaps wishful thinking, like in the poem “Hurtless.” In this poem, the ending devolves into messy repetitions of the phrase “some day this will hurt less.” Repetition is also familiar, and many of the poems talk about the repetition of toxic cycles. The cover of Burns also repeats the title, which I love. I think it represents these cycles as well.
EG: How does Spanish’s integration with English, such as in “latinxpoética” or “Mi tía texts me,” reflect your cultural narrative or experience with gender?
SGH: I have a complicated relationship with both languages, which the poem “latinxpoética” delves into. Early on in my writing life, I received a lot of pushback for including any Spanish in my poetry. I grew up bilingual so of course I was deeply impacted by that attempt at cultural erasure. Currently in my poetry, I try push the bounds of English and Spanish to make more room for queer multilingual and decolonial ways of being.
EG: Humor is employed very tenderly in many of the poems in Burns; can you speak to why humor was important to include in this collection?
SGH: Humor is a very important cultural value to me! I write about some difficult things I have been through, and I fully believe that sometimes you just have to laugh so you don’t cry. Sometimes tragedy can also lead to the comically absurd.
EG: Many of these poems utilize footnotes to contextualize and interrogate the beliefs society holds about gender and trans identities; how does including footnotes extend or inflate the pathos of these poems?
SGH: Footnotes are always fun to play around with. I think it adds another layer to the poem and complicates the reading experience. In “trans poetica” specifically, the footnotes show the hidden undercurrent of what’s happening to the speaker within the poem. The speaker can feel one way about their gender, but often other people have something to say. The footnotes are a way to contend with these different voices.
EG: Colonization is one of the most potent motifs in Burns. Can you speak to the myriad ways this motif strengthens many of your poems such as “My Phone Alerts Me About Queen Elizabeth IIʼs Platinum Jubilee” and “arte poética”?
SGH: Decolonialism is a lifelong ever-present commitment. These ideas appear in so many of my poems because I’m always considering its impact on our society broadly and my culture specifically. I can’t talk about Latinx heritage without talking about colonialism.
EG:Burns does not abide by a singular poetic form. How does playing with parentheses and experimenting with form allow certain poems, including “necropoetica,” “anthropoetica,” “ignorant american,” and “Some Issues,” to complicate issues of gender?
SGH: As a nonbinary person and poet, I definitely approach gender and poetic form the same way. I work with whatever fits the occasion, which usually involves queering language in some way. I’m a firm believer in trying different forms and presentations until you find what’s right, and what’s right can always change.
EG: Many of the most emotional and vulnerable poems in this collection delve into memories of your father and childhood. Can you speak to memories’ role in the collection?
SGH: Memory is my book’s best friend. A lot of these poems felt urgent to write and record; there are many memories that only I hold since my father has passed. However, these memories get complicated, because I don’t have anyone to corroborate them. I’m able to take poetic liberty and think of what works best in the world of the poem. The line between poetry and memory is there, but it is faint at times.
SG Huerta, a Xicanx writer, is the poetry editor of Abode Press, a Roots.Wounds.Words. fellow, and a Tin House alum. The author of two poetry chapbooks and the nonfiction chapbook GOOD GRIEF (fifth wheel press, 2025), their work has appeared in Honey Literary and elsewhere. Find them at sghuertawriting.com.
Emma Goss (she/her/hers) is a senior English major with minors in Film and Linguistic Anthropology. A passionate reader, she prefers to always be juggling a poetry collection, a literary fiction novel, and an audiobook. Emma is especially drawn to poetry rooted in nature symbolism and metaphor. Some of her favorite collections include The Tradition by Jericho Brown, War of the Foxes by Richard Siken, What the Living Do by Marie Howe, and Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson. Her poetry has been published in Pangyrus Magazine and by the Princeton Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Poetry Contest. Originally from Los Angeles, she spends her time hiking local trails or browsing the poetry shelves at Barnes & Noble Studio City when not at Vassar.
Ahead of the release of his e-chapbook, Quantum Entanglements with Notes on Loss, Abdulrazaq Salihu spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern, Marian Kohng, about his work. Salihu discussed the connection between physical science and spiritual loss, how grief isolates yet undeniably connects one to everything outside of themself, and the importance of empty space to his work, whether in music or poetry.
Marian Kohng: What did you wish to convey when connecting the various theories of the universe with human emotions?
Abdulrazaq Salihu: I wanted to insist that grief is not small, not private, and not confined to the body that holds it. The language of physics, quantum entanglement, dark matter, and parallel universes gave me a vocabulary large enough to hold the magnitude of loss I was carrying. When someone dies, especially violently, the rupture feels cosmic. It rearranges gravity. It bends time. It changes how light enters the room. By aligning human emotion with theories of the universe, I was trying to say: what happens inside us is as real and consequential as what happens in the stars. Science and grief are both attempts to explain absence. Both ask: what remains when what we love disappears? In that sense, mourning is a form of physics because we are constantly measuring distances between who we were and who we have become after loss.
MK: Can you speak about the titles of your poems and the significance of them being the first thing readers see?
AS: Titles are thresholds. They are the first consent a reader gives a poem. I take them seriously because I want the reader to arrive already unsettled, already thinking, already leaning forward. Many of my titles function almost like philosophical propositions or prayer lines: “At the Laboratory, I Gave a Stranger My Faith” and “He Understood Qada’a Wal Qadr.” They ask the reader to slow down, to breathe differently, to accept that logic and belief, science and spirituality, will coexist without apology. The titles do not explain the poems; they prepare the nervous system for what is coming. In a book about loss, titles are also acts of care. They tell the reader: this grief has language, structure, and intention. You are not walking into chaos; you are walking into a carefully held silence and I think because titles are really the first thing the readers see, it’s the first determinant of impression, so if I can win with a title, I have won with the entire work.
MK: What is the role of music and silence and the juxtaposition between them?
AS: Music and silence are siblings in my work. Music is what we reach for when language fails; silence is what remains when even music collapses. In poems like “All the Things I Love, the Sands Have Covered with Memory,” music becomes a kind of inheritance. Voices of fathers, radios, communal songs. In Silence is a Ghost, silence becomes presence, something that follows you, occupies rooms, presses against the body. Music for me goes beyond songs, every syllable, punctuation, space, pause and rhythm constitutes what I regard as music, because it flickers the rhythm of the heart. I am interested in the moment when music stops and you are left alone with what you feel. In grief, silence is never empty. It is crowded with memory, regret, prayer, unfinished conversations. I use music to soften the entry into loss, and silence to show its aftermath.
MK: Can you speak about the intention behind the blanks and brackets in your poems?
AS: The blanks and brackets are where language admits defeat. They mark what cannot be safely spoken, what is culturally unsayable, what is too violent, too intimate, or too sacred to be named directly. In “Phantasmagoria with my Country Women as Stardust and Night Song,” the interruptions are not aesthetic tricks, they are ethical pauses. They give the reader space to breathe, to fill in meaning with their own grief, their own memory. Loss fractures speech. These gaps are faithful to that fracture. Sometimes, the most honest line in a poem is the one that refuses to exist.
MK: What part does a sense of belonging play in grief and healing?
AS: Belonging is really both wound and medicine. To belong deeply to a language, a family, a town like Sarkin Pawa means that loss does not happen alone. It reverberates. It’s really Ubuntu, that I am because you are, because we are. When someone dies, the community feels it in their bones, in their rituals, in their silences. Healing, for me, is not forgetting; it is remembering together. Language becomes a home when physical places are no longer safe. Family becomes a shelter even when it is fragile. Grief isolates, but belonging insists you do not carry this alone and that’s what belonging does.
MK: Can you speak about the Greek mythology in “Thanatos Learns to Love Family Loosely”?
AS: Greek mythology allowed me to externalize grief, to give death a body, a personality, a seat at the table. Thanatos is not just death; he is death learning tenderness, restraint, love. By bringing gods like Hypnos, Nyx, Erebus into a domestic space, I was collapsing the distance between myth and everyday mourning. The first Greek character I learnt about was Medusa, from my sister, it was empathetic and fascinating what her story did to me, I felt she deserved so much better than the cruel world offered her so I read more myths and that was the start. It was my way of asking: what if death is not only cruel, but confused? What if even death has to learn how to leave gently?
MK: What message were you delivering by focusing on the human body in “At the Laboratory, I Gave a Stranger My Faith…”?
AS: The body is where belief becomes real. In that poem, the laboratory is not just scientific, it is spiritual. I wanted to explore what happens when faith is placed in another person’s hands, when destiny (Qada’a wal Qadr) is examined under fluorescent lights. The poem insists that science does not negate belief; it sharpens it. The body becomes a site of trust, vulnerability, and surrender. To offer your body or your faith is to accept uncertainty. That acceptance is not weakness; it is devotion, it’s a sacred promise.
MK: How did you decide the tone of the last poem compared to the first?
AS: The first poem is communal, outward-facing, almost declarative. It introduces empathy as an act of survival. The last poem is quieter, heavier, more reflective. It understands that empathy does not save everyone, but it saves something; memory, dignity, witness. The book begins by reaching outward and ends by sitting still. That arc mirrors grief itself. You start by screaming; you end by listening.
MK: Can you speak about the mirroring of nature with emotions of loss?
AS: Nature does not mourn politely. It floods and withers. By personifying nature, I was refusing to sanitize grief. The earth reacts the way bodies do. Rivers carry absence. Night expands. Light hesitates. Loss is ecological, it disrupts systems. When a father dies, the weather changes inside a home. Nature becomes a language that does not lie and I’m a witness to all of this grief and climate change in moods.
MK: What does quantum entanglement mean in terms of grief and acceptance?
AS: Quantum entanglement suggests that once two particles are connected, distance no longer matters. That idea saved me. It allowed me to believe that death does not sever relationship, it rearranges it. In grief, acceptance does not mean letting go. It means learning a new physics of love. The dead are not gone; they are elsewhere, still influencing us, still shaping our movements. We remain entangled. Acceptance, then, is not closure. It is continuity without certainty. It is learning how to live knowing that love does not end, it only changes form.
Abdulrazaq Salihu is a Nigerian poet and member of the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation. He won the Splendor of Dawn Poetry Contest, BPKW Poetry Contest, Poetry Archive Poetry Contest, Masks Literary Magazine Poetry Award, Nigerian Prize for Teen Authors (Poetry), Hilltop Creative Writing Award, and others.
He has received fellowships and residencies from Imodeye Writers Enclave Writers Residency, SPRINg and elsewhere. His poetry is published/forthcoming in Uncanny, Bacopa, Consequence, South Florida poetry, Eunoia review, strange horizons, Unstamatic, Bracken, Poetry Quarter(ly), Rogue, B*k, Jupiter review, black moon magazine, Angime, Grub Street mag and elsewhere. He tweets @Arazaqsalihu, and his Instagram is @Abdulrazaq._salihu. He is the author of Constellations (polar sphere, 2022) and hiccups (polar sphere, 2022).
Marian Kohng (she/her/hers) is a proud Korean American and an Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications and a Traffic Copy Editor at a local news station in Tucson, AZ. She also has a Bachelor’s in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science and a Master’s in Marketing. She loves to get lost in a good book and will read just about anything, including the back of the shampoo bottle.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Bleah Patterson. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, February 22nd, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/sundress with the password “safta”.
Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!
Starting this month, we are excited to present themed Xfits! February’s theme is “Let it Out!” While the format of Xfit will remain the same, participants will focus their drafts around catharsis: what is making you feel angry or stifled? What do you need to get off your chest and down on paper?
Bleah Patterson is a queer, southern poet from Texas. Much of her work explores the contention between identity and home and has been featured or is forthcoming in various journals including Electric Literature, Pinch, Grist, The Laurel Review, Phoebe Literature, The Rumpus, and Taco Bell Quarterly.
