The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce the guests for the November installment of our reading series, poets DeeSoul Carson and Aline Mello. Join us on Thursday, November 16th at Pretentious Beer Co. from 7:00-9:00 PM for a reading followed by an open mic hosted by Shlagha Borah. Sign-up for the open mic begins at 7 PM sharp and is limited to 10-12 readers.
Aline Mello is a Brazilian writer and editor. She is the author of the poetry collection MORE SALT THAN DIAMOND (Andrews McMeel, 2022). She is an Undocupoet (2018) and her poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, the Breakbeat Poets: Latinext anthology, The New Republic and other publications. Aline is a student at The Ohio State University (MFA).
DeeSoul Carson (He/They) is a poet and educator from San Diego, CA. His work is featured or forthcoming in Voicemail Poems, Narrative Mag, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Offing, & elsewhere. A Stanford Univerity alum, DeeSoul has received fellowships from The Watering Hole and New York University, where he is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com
Our community partner for November is Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, an organization which often supports fundraising campaigns to support specific projects. Their goal is to raise funds necessary to help support a number of humanitarian needs, programs, and projects, including those for sick and injured children in the Middle East, regardless of their religion and without political affiliation or purpose. PCRF retains sole discretion and control over how contributed funds are used.
The situation in Gaza is urgent, and it’s one million children are suffering. The newest round of bombings there has left countless children needing immediate medical attention and basic necessities like food, water, and shelter. Over the past 30 years, PCRF has been providing critical medical care and supplying basic necessities to those most in need. They urgently need your help to continue their vital work and provide immediate relief to these vulnerable children. Please make a donation to support their efforts at https://pcrf1.app.neoncrm.com/forms/gaza-relief.
Knoxville, TN — The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Marah Hoffman. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, November 19th 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!
Marah Hoffman grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania. Since graduating with her bachelors in English and creative writing in 2022, she has lived in Tennessee, Michigan, and now North Carolina. She is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at University of North Carolina Wilmington and the Creative Director of Sundress Academy for the Arts. She enjoys genre fluidity, whimsicality, cats, coffee, distance running, travel, and adding to her personal lexicon. Her list of favorite words grows every week.
Our community partner for November is Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, an organization which often supports fundraising campaigns to support specific projects. Their goal is to raise funds necessary to help support a number of humanitarian needs, programs, and projects, including those for sick and injured children in the Middle East, regardless of their religion and without political affiliation or purpose. PCRF retains sole discretion and control over how contributed funds are used.
The situation in Gaza is urgent, and it’s one million children are suffering. The newest round of bombings there has left countless children needing immediate medical attention and basic necessities like food, water, and shelter. Over the past 30 years, PCRF has been providing critical medical care and supplying basic necessities to those most in need. They urgently need your help to continue their vital work and provide immediate relief to these vulnerable children. Please make a donation to support their efforts at https://pcrf1.app.neoncrm.com/forms/gaza-relief.
Doubleback Books announces the release of Michael Meyerhofer’s What To Do If You’re Buried Alive. The poems in this collection are tenderly masculine, self-deprecating and humorous. They are the poems of an adult male poet looking back at childhood and puberty with anything but rose-colored glasses. He shows us how we see ourselves often through time—with a mixture of cringe and understanding.
Mary Biddinger, author of A Sunny Place with Adequate Water, writes, “With a compassionate eye, and his trademark sense of humor that hooks readers from the very first page, Meyerhofer sends us back to our earliest memories, and shows us a world of heartbreak and wonder.” And Jon Tribble, author of Natural State, adds “Through pain and loss, Meyerhofer’s poems are harrowing prayers searching for ‘the charms of language’ that might lead to forgiveness, to redemption, to love.”
Michael Meyerhofer is the author of five poetry books, six poetry chapbooks, and two fantasy trilogies. He has won the James Wright Poetry Award, the Liam Rector First Book Prize, the Whirling Prize, and other honors. He earned his B.A. from the University of Iowa and his M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He grew up in Iowa, where he learned the value of reading novels, lifting weights, and not getting his hopes up. He currently serves as the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review and lives in Fresno, California. For more information and at least one embarrassing childhood photo, visit www.troublewithhammers.com.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts at Firefly Farms, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is seeking an Editorial Intern for a six-month position. Each part-time position would consist of approximately 5-10 hours of work per week and run from January 5th, 2023 to July 1st, 2024. All applicants must be local to the greater Knoxville, TN area.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is an entirely volunteer-run organization that hosts residencies, workshops, and retreats centered on creative writing in all genres. Located on a 45-acre farm twenty minutes from downtown Knoxville, SAFTA’s mission is to give writers of all levels a chance to work with nationally renowned professionals in their field as well as uninterrupted time to focus on their creative work.
The Editorial Intern’s responsibilities include the preparation of documents necessary to run an independent writer’s residency, such as writing press releases, composing blogs, proofreading, working with social media (Facebook, WordPress, etc.), collating editorial and residency data, research, and more. The intern will also be needed to help facilitate Zoom readings and events.
Preferred qualifications include:
• A keen eye for proof-reading
• Strong written communication skills
• Experience with WordPress, Zoom, Google Sheets, and/or other online mediums
• Knowledge of contemporary literature a plus
While the internship position is unpaid, our staff gain real-world experience in working with online event planning, nonprofit management, running a residency, communications, and more while creating a portfolio of work for future employment. SAFTA staff work alongside members of both the local and national literary community through workshops and readings, which staff are able to attend for free during their tenure with the organization.
To apply, please send a resume and a brief cover letter detailing your interest in the position to the Staff Director, Z Eihausen, at saftastaffdirector@gmail.com. Applications are due by Thursday, November 30th, 2023.
Stephanie Sauer’s Almonds are Members of the Peach Family (Noemi Press, 2019) is a masterful multimedia project that weaves together prose and craftsmanship, bringing light to buried historical narratives. While this is her second traditional prose book, Sauer also has multiple art books that demonstrate her experience with a wide variety of mediums, such as quilting, archiving other’s works, and stitching, specifically of clothing. Her writing is skillful, untangling her family’s history, but it merely accompanies the quilt she crafts throughout the book, the true star of the show. This quilt serves as a work of healing as she begins to reconcile the history all around her.
From the first paragraph, Sauer establishes the idea of quilting as suture, a word typically used for stitches used to hold a wound together. Her first chapter, “Patchwork” opens with pictures of the messy back stitching of something Sauer has sewed. Counterposing these images, Sauer moves readers to Rio, one of the many places the author has lived through her travels. She describes the city as hungry, its sharp mouths constantly searching for bones and blood. She writes, “I bump into one on the way to buy groceries and it slices my arm. I hold the cut with my opposing hand and an incision form from the inside of my skin, letting air in but no blood out” (Sauer 4). Sauer uses suture here to refer to her attempts to find healing via crafting.
She returns to the concept again on page 103, acknowledging that she can not be the first woman to make this connection. Sauer always makes sure to credit those who came before, saying, “Education, I find, has less to do with knowing things and more to do with the crafting and recrafting of oneself” (Sauer 104). She references Dr. Gladys-Marie Fy’s Preface to Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Ante-Bellum South, which documents how slave women would quilt their diaries due to being denied traditional educations.
As a whole, Almonds are Members of the Peach Family pulls historical vignettes through time. Sauer carefully intertwines the story of her grandparents with her own life. Their lives mostly exist in Nevada County, California, where readers are introduced to the version of her grandmother, or Billimae, that Sauer is most familiar with—the caretaker: “She ladles the brine into a bowl and serves it with oyster crackers. She spreads the heart with a butter knife on toast and tells the child to eat, to help herself to more” (Sauer 8). Sauer’s writing peels back these small, tender moments for readers to reveal their quiet intimacy.
The descriptions are transparently honest, transitioning from the above heart-wrenching moment of connection between a younger Sauer and her grandmother, to her grandmother’s description of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband. The transition is jarring, laying out her Grandpa’s veteran status and referencing a friend once saying, “‘Where is my purple heart? My father got one in Vietnam, but what about the rest of us who still have to fight the war he brought back home?’” (Sauer 9). The audience isn’t spared her grandparents’ suffering, and by the end of the section readers are primed to see Sauer coping by way of the sound of her sewing machine.
The collection expands as it continues, becoming less interdisciplinary and more plain prose as Sauer tells Billimae’s tale. Here, the writing is truly given a chance to breathe comfortably, showcasing every side of Billimae, even the uglier ones. “It is family shorthand to call Grandma crazy. The screaming, the secrets, the lies, the sneaking of sweet things into hidden places all over the house, into her mouth. The cussing at and blaming of Grandpa for everything,” Sauer explains (59). The family villainizes this woman in her old age, some waving away any mention of domestic abuse towards her as fabricated. Sauer writes, “Now, Grandma is crazy because calling her this is easier on us. Pinning it on the woman excuses our own complicity in the normalizing of her pain” (59). She criticizes this simplification of everything her grandmother is, recognizing the depth in her past that has shaped her into who she is now.
Sauer is constantly reckoning with her history and family lineage, crafting and writing in an attempt to find some kind of answer. Between stories, readers watch her turn “pulp into pages… stitch linen thread between their creases and bind them to one another” (Sauer 71). Her language around the act is gorgeous, finding imagery in the household chores she idolizes through her words, reclaiming work that patriarchal society deems less than. For example, “I haul up bones from the river and sit, listen to the screaming left in them. I hold up each bone to the light, wipe it clean of debris, realign it back into its skeletal form” (Sauer 146). While her word choice turns morbid at points, it only adds to the passion behind her work and her desire to make something of it all.
Things do not end for Sauer here. After uncovering the bones from the graveyard, one can never truly be the same. Seams weaken over time, and eventually they’ll need to be reinforced: “I wake up late (6:50am), read for a few hours. I make coffee, toast a slice of bread, scrub the sink with borax, shoo away ants, re-hang the quilt, write in my slip, alternate between pushing back and suturing a heartache” (Sauer 149). In the face of it all, though, what Sauer has to do, and what we all have to do, is keep on living.
Izzy Astuto (he/they) is a writer majoring in Creative Writing at Emerson College, with a specific interest in screenwriting. When not in Boston for college, they live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His work has previously been published by Hearth and Coffin, Sage Cigarettes, and Renesme Literary, amongst others. He currently works as an intern for Sundress Publications, and a reader for journals such as hand picked poetry, PRISM international, and Alien Magazine. You can find more of their work on their website, at https://izzyastuto.weebly.com/. Their Instagram is izzyastuto2.0 and Twitter is adivine_tragedy.
When my husband and I decided to move into a nineteen-foot travel trailer, we knew it would mean a major downsize. No problem, I thought, looking around at my clothes, shoes, kitchenware, and toiletries. I love the idea of living minimally and feel so much lighter when I own less. I was up for the challenge… until I got to my bookshelf. How was I supposed to narrow downmy books? And where would I keep them in this tiny space?
Luckily, our camper came complete with this perfect, bookshelf-shaped storage area below the bed. Storage space is extremely valuable (we typically only buy single rolls of toilet paper because there is nowhere to store extra). At first I tried to fill only half of the shelf with books and save the other half for camping gear. But that plan didn’t last long. It is now fully stocked and held in place with this nifty little tension rod-turned-book seatbelt so that nothing gets squished when we lift and lower the bed.
Most of the books I have with me are poetry since that is what I read and re-read most often. I have read most of these books at least three times. Whenever I am reminded of a poem I love, I pull up the bed and dig through my collections to find it. I also re-read my favorite collections when I need some inspiration to get writing in the morning. That is why it feels crucial to keep them all with me. I also keep a few can’t-live-without craft books (like Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio and Structure & Surprise by Michael Theune) for when I feel stuck writing or editing.
I am less sentimental about my fiction books and often only keep one or two at a time, donating them when I am done. I am currently reading The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert so it stays in this little basket by the bed. I also use my iPad for reading when I can’t find a book I am looking for at a local bookshop (although reading on a screen is very much not preferred, it is a huge space saver).
The rest of my precious books live in boxes in a storage unit near my parent’s house. When things get a little bloated in my bookshelf, I will load my suitcase with books before a flight home and transfer them to storage. I often end up bringing a book or two back with me.
As much as I love living on the road, sometimes I daydream about settling into a home and having a huge library. My dream is to have one of those libraries with floor to ceiling bookshelves and a rolling ladder to reach the top. In this dream, I get to keep all the books I love and never have to put one in storage only to decide weeks later that it is exactly what I want to read. Until then, my little hidden bookshelf will do.
Jen Gayda Gupta is a poet, educator, and wanderer. She earned her BA in English at the University of Connecticut and her MA in Teaching English from New York University. She lives, writes, and travels across the U.S. in a tiny camper with her husband and their dog. Her work has been published in Up the Staircase, Rattle, Jellyfish Review, Sky Island Journal, The Shore, and others. You can find her @jengaydagupta and jengaydagupta.com.
Knoxville, TN– The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce our Spring 2024 fellowship and support grant winners: Danielle Emerson, recipient of the Black and/or Indigenous Identifying Writers Fellowship and support grant; Dania Bowie and Emdash, winners of the Spring 2024 LGBTQIA fellowships; and Grisel Y. Acosta, recipient of a support grant for Black and/or Indigenous writers.
These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to explore their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment at our home at Firefly Farms in Knoxville, TN.
Danielle Shandiin Emerson is a Diné writer from Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. Her clans are Tłaashchi’i (Red Cheek People Clan), born for Ta’neezaahníí (Tangled People Clan). She has a B.A. in Education Studies and a B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University. Danielle writes fiction, poetry, plays, and creative essays. Her work centers Diné culture, perspectives, and personal narratives.
Dania Bowie (she/they) is an artist, as well as a resource and community organizer who works to move resources and people power to address systems-level change through civic and political education in Maine. They are first-generation Filipinx American, queer, and a learning abolitionist. Their art—from fiction writing to painting—seeks to connect people, but also complicate the narrative of resilience in immigrant families. Their focus is on the Filipinx diaspora and the consequences of living global lives as previously colonized people.
Emdash AKA Emily Lu Gao (高璐璐）is a poet, performer, bookseller, open mic host, and the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her poetry proudly propagates from Spoken Word & Ethnic Studies—writing in order to heal, grow and decolonize. She has received funding from Jersey City Arts Council, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference. For full publication and performance history, see emdashsays.com. Her work primarily unpacks her bipolar diagnosis, Chinese Americanness, queerness, intergenerational healing/harm, the U.S medical system, and bilingualism. She holds a MFA in Poetry from Rutgers-Newark University and resides on Munsee Lenape Land (Jersey City, NJ). When not writing, she is most likely telling one too many jokes. Any/all pronouns.
Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta (she/they) is the author of Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere (Get Fresh Books, 2021), which was a 2020 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist. She is also editor of the anthology, Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge, 2019), and currently the Creative Writing Editor at Chicana/Latina Studies Journal. Select work by Dr. Acosta is in Limp Wrist; Platform Review; Best American Poetry; Acentos Review; Kweli Journal; Gathering of the Tribes Magazine; Speculative Fiction for Dreamers; and The Future of Black. Recent work includes oral history interviews of Latine/x folks from Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, a project that is funded by the Mellon Foundation/Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative at the City University of New York (CUNY). They are a full professor at the CUNY-BCC, a Macondo fellow, a VONA alum, and a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet. Her work focuses on her Afro-Latinx and indigenous ancestry, queer identity, mental health, the punk and house music subcultures, her birthplace of Chicago, and the destruction of post-colonial neoliberalism in educational environments.
Finalists for this year’s fellowships include Caprice Gray, Les James, Sacha Bissonnette, Shara Chaves, Bleah Patterson, Angela Abiodun, and Tsahai Makeda Wright.
Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce the results of the 2023 Prose Open Reading Period. The winning selection is Laura Dzubay’s Pure Fear, American Legend. The horror collection is scheduled for release in 2024.
The stories in Pure Fear, American Legend are startling, haunting, and memorable. Dzubay’s writing is honest, sharp, and unflinching without being cruel or unkind. Like any good horror story, the most commendable part of this collection is not in the momentary terror but in what happens after: how to live when you realize you’ve survived.
Laura Dzubay is a writer and teacher from Indiana. Her stories and essays have appeared in Mid-American Review, Electric Literature, TIMBER, Gulf Coast, Blue Earth Review, Cimarron Review, and Southern Humanities Review. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University, where she won the AWP Intro Prize.
We are also excited to note our finalists and semifinalists from this year’s Prose Open Reading Period.
Finalists
Perils of Girlhood by Melissa Fraterrigo Matter Out of Place by AnnElise Hatjakes Where the Water is by Anjoli Roy
Semifinalists
A Blur in the Field by Lori Brack Holly by Grace Gilbert The Aves by Ryane Nicole Granados Fighthouse by Liesel Hamilton Just Before Midnight by Abby Manzela People with Antlers by Elena Minor AMNH by Anthony Morena When the Crows Call by Shilo Niziolek More Than I Could Chew by Esteban Rodríguez Wormery by Gretchen VanWormer Vanishing Acts by Lori White
When I was eight, my family and I moved into the house we now live in, and I knew immediately which room would be mine. I moved from room to room listlessly during the initial tour, until we came upon the room with two closets. Opening the first one up, I was delighted to find it was not only a closet, but a floor to ceiling bookshelf! From then on, I determined to fill the shelves up completely.
This task was significantly easier than I expected it to be, and, with my book acquiring habits, the shelves quickly started overflowing. As pictures demonstrate, in my last years of high school, I was stacking books more than shelving them. Honestly, I didn’t end up minding this too much, as much of my reading taste had matured past many of the books on my shelves, so I preferred to have my leather-bound The Picture of Dorian Gray blocking my middle grade Adam Silvera’s and John Green’s.
I couldn’t get rid of any more books at that point, though. Believe it or not, the state of these shelves was after multiple book purges, trying to get rid of as much of my old taste as possible, to make space for all the shiny new covers I drooled over every Barnes and Noble trip. But some books I had far too deep an attachment to to ever get rid of. I still would probably cry if I ever re-read Wendy Mass’ The Candymakers.
The top shelf of the closet was always reserved for my more educational books. When I was younger, the least favorite of the classics my mom forced onto my reading list were also shoved up there, although now many have simply migrated into the mishmash on their own. I could never dream of hating Tuck Everlasting or Pygmalion. I always loved climbing on a chair to reach the precariously stacked tomes on a rainy day, picking out my favorite Childcraft encyclopedia and spending the afternoon reading About Animals or How Things Work.
I don’t live in that bedroom anymore when I am home. I had to beg my younger brother, its current resident, to even allow me to take the above pictures. Now, I don’t read much from that collection, only sneaking in sometimes to pull some old favorite to relentlessly pour over, or allow a friend to borrow. In my current room, I don’t have shelves, so books are once more piled throughout the space, haphazardly arranged by TBR and just read. My taste leans pretentious now, full of Murakami and Didion. I’m a liberal arts student stereotype, with my favorite author as Eve Babitz and a guilty understanding of the narrator from The Stranger‘s thought process.
I can’t help but wonder what my taste will be like in a year’s time, what this post would look like if I made it next summer instead. Maybe I’ll have some actual shelves by then. But probably not.
Izzy Astuto (he/they) is a writer currently majoring in Creative Writing at Emerson College. When not in Boston for college, they live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His work has previously been published by Hearth and Coffin, Sage Cigarettes, and Renesme Literary, amongst others. When not writing, he can often be found watching movies and crocheting.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Writing About Our Relationships to the Places We Inhabit,” a workshop led by Shlagha Borah on November 8th, 2023, from 6:00-7:30 PM. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).
In this workshop, participants will read and write about our relationships with the spaces they exist in. They will examine how places shape individuals, especially when they perpetuate violence or oppression in some way. Participants will look into our domestic, public and ecological surroundings to reimagine their environments beyond pastoral poetics. They will then question/explore the idea of “home,” situating themselves in their geographical histories and exploring how it informs the way they view the world. Which place are we running away from? Where do we run towards? The workshop will look at poems by Tarfia Faizullah, Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Tishani Doshi.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Shlagha Borah via Venmo @shlaghab.
Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a queer, multi-genre writer from Assam, India. Her work appears/is forthcoming in Salamander, Nashville Review, Identity Theory, Longleaf Review, Variant Literature, South Dakota Review, Passengers Journal, Rogue Agent, Hunger Journal, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Associate Poetry Editor at Grist. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India.
