The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Puerto Rico en mi corazón edited by Carina Del Valle Schorske, Ricardo Maldonado, Erica Mena, and Raquel Salas Rivera

This selection comes from the anthology, Puerto Rico en mi corazón available from Anomalous Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Erica Mena is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and book artist. They hold an MFA in poetry from Brown University, and an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa. Their book Featherbone (Ricochet Editions, 2015) won a 2016 Hoffer First Horizons Award. Their translation of the Argentine graphic novel The Eternaut by H.G. Oesterheld and F. Solano Lopez (Fantagraphics, 2015) won a 2016 Eisner Award. Their artist books are collected widely. Most recently they created the artist books Puerto Rico en mi corazón, a collection of letterpress printed broadsides by Puerto Rican poets in response to Hurricane Maria, printed in Spanish and English; and Gringo Death Coloring Book by Raquel Salas Rivera with collaborator Mariana Ramos Ortiz.

Raquel Salas Rivera is the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. They are the inaugural recipient of the Ambroggio Prize and the Laureate Fellowship, both from the Academy of American Poets. They are also the author of six chapbooks and five full-length poetry books. Their fourth book, LO TERCIARIO/THE TERTIARY, was on the 2018 National Book Award Longlist and won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. Their fifth book, WHILE THEY SLEEP (UNDER THE BED IS ANOTHER COUNTRY), was published by Birds, LLC in 2019. They received their PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Raquel loves and lives for Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, and a world free of white supremacy.

RICARDO ALBERTO MALDONADO was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Collateral (Akashic Books/National Poetry Series) and the recipient of fellowships in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Queer Arts Mentorship. He is managing director at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center.

Carina del Valle Schorske is a poet, essayist, and Spanish language translator at large in New York City. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, the New Yorker online, the Los Angeles Review of Books, small axe salon, and elsewhere, always elsewhere. She won Gulf Coast’s 2016 Prize for her translations of the Puerto Rican poet Marigloria Palma–an ongoing project. She is currently at work on her first book, a psychogeograpnhy of Puerto Rican culture, forthcoming from Riverhead and tentatively titled NO ES NADA: Notes from the Other Island. Wherever you are, there is always another island to see through to.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Puerto Rico en mi corazón edited by Carina Del Valle Schorske, Ricardo Maldonado, Erica Mena, and Raquel Salas Rivera

This selection comes from the anthology, Puerto Rico en mi corazón available from Anomalous Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Erica Mena is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and book artist. They hold an MFA in poetry from Brown University, and an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa. Their book Featherbone (Ricochet Editions, 2015) won a 2016 Hoffer First Horizons Award. Their translation of the Argentine graphic novel The Eternaut by H.G. Oesterheld and F. Solano Lopez (Fantagraphics, 2015) won a 2016 Eisner Award. Their artist books are collected widely. Most recently they created the artist books Puerto Rico en mi corazón, a collection of letterpress printed broadsides by Puerto Rican poets in response to Hurricane Maria, printed in Spanish and English; and Gringo Death Coloring Book by Raquel Salas Rivera with collaborator Mariana Ramos Ortiz.

Raquel Salas Rivera is the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. They are the inaugural recipient of the Ambroggio Prize and the Laureate Fellowship, both from the Academy of American Poets. They are also the author of six chapbooks and five full-length poetry books. Their fourth book, LO TERCIARIO/THE TERTIARY, was on the 2018 National Book Award Longlist and won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. Their fifth book, WHILE THEY SLEEP (UNDER THE BED IS ANOTHER COUNTRY), was published by Birds, LLC in 2019. They received their PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Raquel loves and lives for Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, and a world free of white supremacy.

RICARDO ALBERTO MALDONADO was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Collateral (Akashic Books/National Poetry Series) and the recipient of fellowships in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Queer Arts Mentorship. He is managing director at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center.

Carina del Valle Schorske is a poet, essayist, and Spanish language translator at large in New York City. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, the New Yorker online, the Los Angeles Review of Books, small axe salon, and elsewhere, always elsewhere. She won Gulf Coast’s 2016 Prize for her translations of the Puerto Rican poet Marigloria Palma–an ongoing project. She is currently at work on her first book, a psychogeograpnhy of Puerto Rican culture, forthcoming from Riverhead and tentatively titled NO ES NADA: Notes from the Other Island. Wherever you are, there is always another island to see through to.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer

This selection comes from Anne Boyer’s book, Garments Against Women available from Ahsahta Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Krista Cox.

Anne Boyer is a critically acclaimed U.S. poet and essayist and the inaugural winner of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is also a 2018 Whiting Award winner in Nonfiction and Poetry and will the 2018-2019 Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. Her books include the CLMP award-winning Garments Against Women. She was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1973.

Krista Cox is a poet, editor, artist, and community organizer based in South Bend, Indiana, but she’s always dreaming of somewhere saltier. Krista’s poetry appears in many fine journals, and she’s presently seeking a publisher for her chapbook How to Kiss a Monster. She’s the Managing Editor of Doubleback Review, a fledgling online journal that features work previously published at now-defunct journals, and an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection, the longest continuously-publishing online journal on the web. In 2013, Krista founded Lit Literary Collective, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that hosts affordable, accessible writing retreats and otherwise serves her local writing community. Krista received an honors BA in English from Indiana University South Bend. Sometimes she draws fat unicorns and paints cute animals.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer

This selection comes from Anne Boyer’s book, Garments Against Women available from Ahsahta Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Krista Cox.

Anne Boyer is a critically acclaimed U.S. poet and essayist and the inaugural winner of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is also a 2018 Whiting Award winner in Nonfiction and Poetry and will the 2018-2019 Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. Her books include the CLMP award-winning Garments Against Women. She was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1973.

Krista Cox is a poet, editor, artist, and community organizer based in South Bend, Indiana, but she’s always dreaming of somewhere saltier. Krista’s poetry appears in many fine journals, and she’s presently seeking a publisher for her chapbook How to Kiss a Monster. She’s the Managing Editor of Doubleback Review, a fledgling online journal that features work previously published at now-defunct journals, and an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection, the longest continuously-publishing online journal on the web. In 2013, Krista founded Lit Literary Collective, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that hosts affordable, accessible writing retreats and otherwise serves her local writing community. Krista received an honors BA in English from Indiana University South Bend. Sometimes she draws fat unicorns and paints cute animals.

Meet our New Intern: JoAnna Brooker

I became a writer for the same reason anyone does: a book was my first real friend. I hear this happens sometimes when you’re home-schooled. I spent my childhood nuzzled up in my book nook, reading stories about Anne with the carrot hair, or Elizabeth Bennett’s mouth. I entered public school in the fifth grade, round glasses, half-formed boobs and all. I wrote a short story about a chair falling like a ballerina and I won a writing award. My life’s been chasing that high ever since.

In middle school, I’d write garbled, flowery prose on my old Windows computer,

attempting to emulate the Naruto fanfiction I’d read on FanFiction.com. I showed my best friend Jennifer my writing when I was 13. She took out her retainer to squint at the neon green ink on my laptop screen. Her only critique? “No plot.”

When my parents got divorced I got actual material. I wrote Tumblr poetry in high school in anonymous bliss, until my classmates found my blog. Their readings of my poetry to my ex boyfriends kept my habits under wraps for years.

Until my senior year of high school, when Mrs. Tharpe shook back her blonde hair and asked us to write three essays about our life, like Joan Didion did. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

 I had stopped journaling when I was 13, after I lost them all in the move. But writing my story again, as it had happened in order to understand it, gave me a clarity and sharpness like I had just tasted mountain air. So I declared myself a Journalism major, and decided to go to the grand University of Tennessee.

Undergrad was a fever dream. I wrote arts & culture pieces for The Daily Beacon for six months, and then for a year and a half I got to write a Wednesday weekly column about women’s adversity called “My Humps”. I got to intern with The Knoxville Mercury (RIP in peace) and witness a deteriorating media company first hand. So, I declared a second major in English–because the loss only showed me how important it was. My Creative Nonfiction and Poetry classes supported this belief. For my last year and a half, I wrote sketches for UnwarranTed, a Volunteer Channel comedy show, and started doing stand up.

Now, I have a B.S. in Journalism and a fervent desire to make sense of the world around me. I have been lucky to have met so many inspiring and encouraging English teachers and professors in my academic career who have challenged me, and helped me focus my needle in a haystack ambitions. I am honored to be given the opportunity to work for Sundress Publications, and excited to learn how to contribute to and connect to this beautiful literary world.

Interview with Katie Burgess, author of Wind on the Moon

Author Katie Burgess gives Sundress intern Maria Esquinca a glimpse into her persistence as a writer of flash fiction — the moon landings, postpartum depression, humor, and heartbreak in her stories, and growing up conservative Southern Baptist — all themes that influence her Sundress chapbook, Wind on the Moon!

Maria Esquinca: I’m curious as to why you’re drawn to flash? What sorts of freedoms does it allow you? What restrictions?

Katie Burgess: For a long time I felt like I would never be able to write flash. I loved reading it because of how weird and playful it can be. I think flash can get away with being really strange, because the story is over before the reader knows what hit them. But I couldn’t figure out how to be that concise and still tell a complete story. I had three flash pieces in my MFA thesis, and my committee pretty much hated them. One of the pieces was about an astronaut admitting that he’d faked the moon landing, and I couldn’t bring myself to let it go. It eventually became the title story in “Wind on the Moon,” after I spent ten years revising it and sending it out and having it get rejected. (I don’t recommend doing that, but it’s what I did.) Now that I’ve gotten the hang of it more—or now that I’m at least averaging less than one decade per story—I really don’t feel restricted in any way writing flash. It’s so flexible.

ME: Can you talk about parents, parenting, and the precarious situations of your collection?

KB: A lot of these stories were written either while I was pregnant with my son or during the first year after he was born. I had pretty bad postpartum depression, and right as I was starting to get better, fucking Trump was elected. So at that point I was basically reading Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” and sobbing all the time? All. The. Time. And when I was able to write anything, it tended to come from that place. “If You Lived Here” was originally about a mother and a baby. They’re going around the mall, and the mother wonders if the stroller will be too cumbersome if they have to escape a mass shooting. That version of the story got rejected a dozen or so times before I finally realized I needed to take the baby out. The pathos was way over the top with the baby in there. Sometimes the anxiety of parenting is too much to handle, even in fiction.

ME: Can you talk about why you choose to narrate some of these stories through the voice of young females?

KB: I mostly write narrators who are close to my own demographic. There’s a great essay by Daniel José Older about writing the Other, and at one point he says, “Forget the other—can you write you?” I do often make them younger than I am because I have the benefit of hindsight. I can think about what it meant to be eighteen a lot more clearly now than I could when I was eighteen.

ME: Can you talk about the queer characters in your collection? What are your hopes for them?

KB: I hope they have amazing lives full of love and happiness. And revenge. A whole lot of revenge, against everyone who ever wronged them. I mean, the best revenge is to live well, and I hope they do that, but I also want them to get the petty kind of revenge, and I want them to savor it. “Variables” came from thinking about the LGBTQIA people I know who are so kind to their non-affirming parents, giving them chance after undeserved chance, and how exhausting that must be. “The Chronicles of Steve” is more silly. It’s me responding to the whole “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” thing with “oH, gOD madE AdaM anD eVE.”

ME: There’s a line in “The Emptiness Walks With You,” which reads “You’re walking down a dark road, thinking about emptiness, how singular it is that there should be a word to describe a quantity of nothing, and soon you feel the emptiness around you, and the emptiness walks with you.” Can you talk about this line—this feeling?

KB: It’s a line from a story in the main character’s English textbook, and it’s meant to be literary-sounding gibberish. It’s there to make the character angry. No one in his life understands him, and then this pretentious story is trying to say it knows what he’s thinking. (If any readers do get something out of that line, I guess this is where the death of the author comes in.) That story was inspired by a writer I went to grad school with. We were in a meeting to decide what to accept for the literary journal’s next issue, and he started yelling about how much he hated second-person narration. He said, “It’s all ‘You’re walking down the street, and you do this,’ and I’m like ‘No I’m not! I’m reading a story!’” I like the second person, but I also enjoyed his rant.

ME: Can you talk about “Egg Baby” and the role of nurturing and caretaking in this collection?

KB: I think Jennifer in “Egg Baby” might be the only competent caretaker in the collection? Sure, she makes the one joke about putting her child in the refrigerator. But when things get messed up, she’s the one who can fix it. In most of the other stories, the caretakers are absent, negligent, or mentally unwell. Or lying to their kid about having been to space. Again, that comes from the time in my life when I wrote them, when all I could think about was how my child was like this delicate little egg that I was sure to break because of everything I was doing wrong.

ME: There are definitely some funny moments in this collection. Can you talk about writing humor? How did you learn to write humor?

KB: I’ve always been drawn to it—probably as a way of avoiding Big Feelings. Once in a workshop, I got a comment that said, “This story is hilarious—I think with a few revisions, it could be heartbreaking.” All I could think was WHY would I want to do that? I am the opposite of Wilco—I am not trying to break your heart! But then I heard Jennine Capó Crucet say this really great thing at a Q&A, basically that if you want to make something funnier in a piece of writing, put something sad right next to it. And that’s something I try to do now. As for how I learned, I started out by imitating anything I found funny. I read this Garfield cartoon in seventh grade where Jon wrote a super gross poem about a dead toad. I thought it was the funniest thing ever because I have always had extremely highbrow taste. I read it to a friend of mine, and then she and I wrote several dozen more stanzas to it, making each one more and more disgusting. I showed them to my English teacher, and I may have made her want to quit her job. Now I do improv, which I recommend to any writer, even if you don’t want to write comedy; you learn so much about narrative and character development. I’m not saying that just because improv is a cult. I swear.

ME: And finally, can you speak to your engagement with God/the Bible in this collection?

KB: I was brought up in a fairly conservative Southern Baptist church, and from there I self-radicalized a lot. I read a book in high school called He Came to Set the Captives Free. It was about spiritual warfare, the idea that Satan is constantly lurking around, trying to trap you. I got to a point where I would lie awake every night and pray I wouldn’t get possessed. If a friend turned the radio to a secular music station, I would whisper, “In Jesus’ name, I command you to leave this place,” to any demons who might happen by. I was terrified that my grandparents were getting mixed up in witchcraft because they were taking yoga for seniors. This went on for years. So yeah, I have some baggage there. I criticize the abuses that can happen when you take everything literally. And “Workshop Note on The Universe” is all about the difficulty of believing in an omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity. (God might be the worst caretaker in the collection.) I don’t think religion is inherently harmful, though. I think it can be weaponized easily because it’s a space where people let themselves be vulnerable. But everyone also needs to have that space in some form. May I recommend improv?

Read Wind on the Moon for free today!

Katie Burgess is the editor of Emrys Journal. She lives in South Carolina, where she performs with Alchemy Comedy Theater. More of her writing can be found at katieburgess.fun.

María Esquinca is an MFA candidate at the University of Miami. She is the winner of the 2018 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared in The Florida Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Scalawag, Acentos Review, No Tender Fences: An An Anthology of Immigrant & First-Generation American Poetry, and is forthcoming from Waxwing. A fronteriza, she was born in Ciudad Juárez, México and grew up in El Paso, Texas. You can find her on Twitter @m_esquinca.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer

This selection comes from Anne Boyer’s book, Garments Against Women available from Ahsahta Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Krista Cox.

Anne Boyer is a critically acclaimed U.S. poet and essayist and the inaugural winner of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is also a 2018 Whiting Award winner in Nonfiction and Poetry and will the 2018-2019 Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. Her books include the CLMP award-winning Garments Against Women. She was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1973.

Krista Cox is a poet, editor, artist, and community organizer based in South Bend, Indiana, but she’s always dreaming of somewhere saltier. Krista’s poetry appears in many fine journals, and she’s presently seeking a publisher for her chapbook How to Kiss a Monster. She’s the Managing Editor of Doubleback Review, a fledgling online journal that features work previously published at now-defunct journals, and an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection, the longest continuously-publishing online journal on the web. In 2013, Krista founded Lit Literary Collective, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that hosts affordable, accessible writing retreats and otherwise serves her local writing community. Krista received an honors BA in English from Indiana University South Bend. Sometimes she draws fat unicorns and paints cute animals.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer

This selection comes from Anne Boyer’s book, Garments Against Women available from Ahsahta Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Krista Cox.

Anne Boyer is a critically acclaimed U.S. poet and essayist and the inaugural winner of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is also a 2018 Whiting Award winner in Nonfiction and Poetry and will the 2018-2019 Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. Her books include the CLMP award-winning Garments Against Women. She was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1973.

Krista Cox is a poet, editor, artist, and community organizer based in South Bend, Indiana, but she’s always dreaming of somewhere saltier. Krista’s poetry appears in many fine journals, and she’s presently seeking a publisher for her chapbook How to Kiss a Monster. She’s the Managing Editor of Doubleback Review, a fledgling online journal that features work previously published at now-defunct journals, and an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection, the longest continuously-publishing online journal on the web. In 2013, Krista founded Lit Literary Collective, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that hosts affordable, accessible writing retreats and otherwise serves her local writing community. Krista received an honors BA in English from Indiana University South Bend. Sometimes she draws fat unicorns and paints cute animals.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer

This selection comes from Anne Boyer’s book, Garments Against Women available from Ahsahta Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Krista Cox.

Anne Boyer is a critically acclaimed U.S. poet and essayist and the inaugural winner of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is also a 2018 Whiting Award winner in Nonfiction and Poetry and will the 2018-2019 Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. Her books include the CLMP award-winning Garments Against Women. She was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1973.

Krista Cox is a poet, editor, artist, and community organizer based in South Bend, Indiana, but she’s always dreaming of somewhere saltier. Krista’s poetry appears in many fine journals, and she’s presently seeking a publisher for her chapbook How to Kiss a Monster. She’s the Managing Editor of Doubleback Review, a fledgling online journal that features work previously published at now-defunct journals, and an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection, the longest continuously-publishing online journal on the web. In 2013, Krista founded Lit Literary Collective, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that hosts affordable, accessible writing retreats and otherwise serves her local writing community. Krista received an honors BA in English from Indiana University South Bend. Sometimes she draws fat unicorns and paints cute animals.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Feed by Emily Mohn-Slate

This selection comes from Emily Mohn–Slate‘s chapbook, Feed available from Seven Kitchens Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Krista Cox.

Emily Mohn–Slate is the author of THE FALLS, winner of the New American Poetry Prize (New American Press, Forthcoming, 2020), and FEED, winner of the Keystone Chapbook Prize (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). Her poems and essays can be found in New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, The Adroit Journal, Indiana Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches middle and high school English, leads writing workshops in the community, and is a member of The Madwomen in the Attic Workshops at Carlow University.

Krista Cox is a poet, editor, artist, and community organizer based in South Bend, Indiana, but she’s always dreaming of somewhere saltier. Krista’s poetry appears in many fine journals, and she’s presently seeking a publisher for her chapbook How to Kiss a Monster. She’s the Managing Editor of Doubleback Review, a fledgling online journal that features work previously published at now-defunct journals, and an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection, the longest continuously-publishing online journal on the web. In 2013, Krista founded Lit Literary Collective, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that hosts affordable, accessible writing retreats and otherwise serves her local writing community. Krista received an honors BA in English from Indiana University South Bend. Sometimes she draws fat unicorns and paints cute animals.