Meet Our New Intern: Addie Dodge

A white woman with short blonde hair is standing in front of a brick wall looking at the camera.

I have always loved stories. As a child, weekends were spent at the library amassing impossibly large stacks of books. I had a tendency for sneaking off from the children’s section to the literature aisles, tucking works like Frankenstein and To Kill a Mockingbird into the middle of my pile to try to make my selections a little less suspicious. Usually, I got away with it. 

My love for reading translated into a love for writing as well. Poetry came first, as I attended readings and workshops throughout high school, and longer-form fiction followed, leading me to where I am now, finishing the final edits of my first novel manuscript while also getting ready to begin work on a second project.

I entered college fully intent on pursuing a major in creative writing. A voracious reader and writer, I began my coursework with a great deal of excitement and urgency to learn. However, I found myself questioning if this was the right path for me as I also began taking classes in psychology and falling in love with the field. At the same time, I was hired as an editor for my college’s literary magazine, Cipher, and was finding great purpose and passion in working with writers and other editors to bring pieces to full realization. I was excited about and impassioned by my work as an editor, while also wrestling with the question of whether I was going to continue pursuing writing or delve further into psychology. Now, in my senior year of college, I’ve decided to do both. 

For me, working as an editor is a direct extension of my writing practice. This work has given me the space to consider writing from a different angle, and to work with other writers in a holistic and generative process, something I am excited to continue in my work with Sundress Publications. 

While it may seem like a strange combination, working as a clinical intern at a domestic violence shelter while also pursuing editorial work, I believe that my work in the field of psychology is a different translation of what I do as an editor and writer. As I move further along the path to becoming a therapist, it’s clear to me that much of this clinical work is listening to and assisting in realizing individuals’ stories in order to help them process what has happened to them. 

On the other side of that coin, I see my work in editing as another way of bringing stories to the surface through supporting writers in the development and propulsion of their stories. I deeply believe in the inherent healing that is available in telling stories, and in those stories being heard and understood. As such, I believe that the development and distribution of published works is crucial to our societal well-being. It is a great privilege for me to work with people and their stories in these two separate, but inextricable modalities. 

Addie Dodge is a student at Colorado College pursuing a BA in Psychology with a Minor in English. She is a writer currently working as an editor for her college’s literary magazine, Cipher, and is also a clinical intern at a domestic violence shelter in Colorado. She fills her free time with hiking in the mountains and lots of reading. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Hush by Nikki Ummel

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Hush by Nikki Ummel (Belle Point Press 2023).

Fantasy of Walking My Niece Home

We veer off the path,
				head for the trees,
		knee-deep in pine straw.

My niece launches herself
								from the Radio Flyer,
her feet crunching in pine needles.

She sinks her hands into sharp pine cones.
			They become missiles,
						bomb the thick straw for enemy ships.

Look! I cry,
		pointing to the looming trees:		the pine cones
						          		      have come so far.

She jumps, flaps her hands open and closed.
We have to put them back,
				she says. Their mommy will miss them.

Clutching pine cones in her too-small palms,
		she hugs them to her body:
					A child, far from home. Mother, unreachable.

							Sharp	distance.	My sister,
					sheathed in stiff sheets & soft lights,
							pink nails painted by kind hospice nurses.

She is two.								The world is still kind.

		I tell her,	some things can’t
										come home.

	She takes a pine cone, shoves it
in my pocket, deep.

She says,
We will make a home for them.

Nikki Ummel is a queer writer, editor, and educator in New Orleans. Nikki’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, The Georgia Review, and more. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and twice awarded an Academy of American Poets Award. She is the 2022 winner of the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize. You can find her wandering around Holy Cross with her beautiful dog and equally beautiful partner.


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

Sundress Academy for the Arts to Host February Poetry Xfit

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Ashley Hajimirsadeghi. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, February 18 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! 

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an Iranian American multimedia artist, writer, and journalist currently pursuing an M.A. in Global Humanities at Towson University. Her creative writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Passages North, The Cortland Review, Salamander, RHINO, Salt Hill, and The Journal, among others. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief at Mud Season Review, a former Brooklyn Poets Fellow, an assistant editor at Sundress Publications, and a contributing writer and film critic at MovieWeb. She can be found at www.ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com // Instagram: @nassarine

This event is brought to you in part by grants provided by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the Tennessee Arts Commission. 

While this is a free event, donations can be made to the Sundress Academy for the Arts here.

Each month we split donations with our community partner. Our community partner for February is Bryant’s Bridge. Bryant’s Bridge intends to provide affordable housing and a safe space to prevent homelessness and promote the successful transition from youth to adulthood.This organization was created to be a safe place and a long-term option with the goal of making linkages to supportive services that can help people heal and grow through the gap until they can become fully functioning, stable adults with a promising life ahead of them. Find more about the important work they do here.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Belle Point Press 2023).

Rocket Science

When Chickie and I climbed into the tree
to sit and wait for our periods,
Chickie was an optimist. I wasn’t sure
mine would ever come. But it did
months after Chickie showed off
her belt, the hooks on each end. Swinging
her legs over the branch, she explained
how grown up felt more clearly than
our teacher did in her lecture,
“On Being a Woman,” better
than the grainy black and white film
with its scientific diagrams—
the retort-shaped organ floating
in our girl bodies, the miniature
rockets our brothers were
always trying to get us to touch.

Chickie and I educated ourselves,
studied the pamphlets, got answers
from the books we read.
We believed in science then, in Apollo
and a manned moon. We believed
we had learned all we needed
to know about how it would go
with the boys. We imagined it
was an experiment in simple biology.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for her fourth book, The Mercy of Traffic. 


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

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Belle Point Press 2023).

content warning for pedophilia

Dog Days

Along this county FM road there’s water vapor
gathered in the ditches and overhead
the oaks show dusty green. The radio reports
on politics and fornication, a teacher
and her thirteen-year-old lover. Good folks
are stunned by gossip and hot weather.

Lord, save us from the need to chide sad flesh
or to believe we’re not all animals with wishes.
Help us admit the blessing in an August wind,
a cloud-troweled sky, the shelf of blue behind.

Show us the truth’s an urgent belly,
what we need most, the slick fender on a Chevy,
a body bent over it, hot as a summer garage,
the roller coaster second before we come.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for her fourth book, The Mercy of Traffic. 


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

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Belle Point Press 2023).

Naked

The fall your father died all the leaves came down
in a three-day rainstorm. It was a damned fine storm.
The rain went on steady, one day into the next, while
leaves fell slow and constant, regular as raindrops.
The last hay baled weeks before, farmers at the co-op
had nothing to do but nod and rock and spit, and watch
the trees strip, till they were naked in the carpeted fields.

You were thirty-four the year those wet hills unrolled, glossy
as a calendar picture, and you took your father’s cancer
like you did the weather. Under the dripping eaves, your chair
tipped back, you talked about the hay, but you seemed slighter,
more like a boy, as if your father’s passing gave you back
childhood, stripped you, washed you down. As if he
fathered you, dying, and you could be naked then, being his son.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for her fourth book, The Mercy of Traffic. 


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

Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents February Reading Series

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce the guests for the February installment of our reading series, poets Minadora Macheret and Topaz Winter. Join us on Thursday, February 15th 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.

Minadora Macheret is a Herbert Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her Ph.D. from the University of North Texas. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Salamander, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of, Love Me, Anyway (Porkbelly Press, 2018).

Topaz Winters is the Singaporean American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022), Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019), & poems for the sound of the sky before thunder (Math Paper Press 2017). She serves as editor-in-chief of Half Mystic Press, an independent, international, & interdisciplinary publishing project, & as co-editor of Kopi Break, a journal of new Singapore poetry. Her work has been published in & featured by Poets.org, The Drift, Passages North, Hobart, The Boiler, The Straits Times, American Banker, The Business Times, the National University of Singapore, & the Center for Fiction. She lives between New York & Singapore 

This event is brought to you in part by grants provided by The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the Tennessee Arts Commission. 

Each month we split donations with our community partner. Our community partner for February is Bryant’s Bridge. Bryant’s Bridge intends to provide affordable housing and a safe space to prevent homelessness and promote the successful transition from youth to adulthood.

This organization was created to be a safe place and a long-term option with the goal of making linkages to supportive services that can help people heal and grow through the gap until they can become fully functioning, stable adults with a promising life ahead of them. Find more about the important work they do here.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Belle Point Press 2023).

Kissing the Frog

i.

At the all-night Pancake House,
the plastic seats cracked
and the water glasses etched

by 1000 washings, we connect
eagerly, hurried in from
opposite directions, pale and damp.

At home, we each have
someone perfect we can’t trust—
striped shirts, blond wrists.

Hunched over our cups,
we recall mouth-watering days
at the river. Mayflies hovered

on slack eddies, the sun
leached all colors to olive drab.
Should I ask if you still believe

in wet kisses rising
to the surface like catfish?
Should I say

I’m still the same hungry princess
prying at the sticky menu
where I wish to find our story,

read it out loud and discover
what comes after happy.
Is it the picture of me lying

on your chest?
The slithery touch? Is it the kiss
that changes your face?

Imagine us. How it would be
to open our ribs,
to gather in the small, dark frogs.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for her fourth book, The Mercy of Traffic. 


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

Project Bookshelf: Whitney Cooper

A cherry-wood bookshelf stands with a variety of books sitting on it.

Throughout my childhood, my mother (darling Virgo she is) put a herculean effort to help keep my space organized, including my bookshelf. Now that I’m an adult, my partner has stepped up and taken that responsibility. She has pulled our books from boxes and lovingly shelved them through many moves. “Organized” is nowhere near the top of my list of self-descriptors. If it were up to me (and, thankfully, it is not), our books would be piled up on furniture and desks, if not stuffed in a forsaken box somewhere. We are still in need of an additional bookshelf, but we are very pleased with the little cherry wood shelf that stands in our living room today.

My partner’s shelving is an art, and I notice it especially on the second shelf. Most of these books were purchased or gifted back in my high school and early undergraduate days. As I entered high school, I felt ready to move on from the Harry Potter and Warriors series, but I had no idea where to start. After stumbling through Wuthering Heights and devouring Jane Eyre, I began to believe that classics were the height of literature, leading to this charming row of Barnes & Noble classics. 

A row of books sits on a shelf. A decorative glass pelican sits in from of the books.

My preference for literary fiction remains, but I’ve branched out significantly over the years, especially as I’ve also come to fall in love with poetry. Engaging with literature by Black writers has become essential to me. While my personal book collection continues to fall short of where I would like it, my local library has been a help: it was there I discovered Native Son which, like much of Richard’s Wright’s work, is as gorgeous and essential as it is devastating. I was also introduced to Octavia Butler’s Kindred, which taught me that science fiction and literary merit are by no means mutually exclusive. 

A hand holds a battered copy of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

We still have a box of books stowed away, and I still get overwhelmed by all the books I have to finish. (I only get one lifetime? Unfair!) I feel I have changed so much over the years, I feel the need to reread books I have read. My battered copy of Wuthering Heights deserves such a reread. Even with all these taxing demands, 2024 gave birth to my New Year’s resolution to read more books. Now that I have this commitment, along with photographic evidence of books I have owned for years but have yet to open, it appears I have no choice but to follow through.

I could read a book every week for the rest of my life and not make a dent in what poets and authors have given us over the centuries. The thought simultaneously exhausts and energizes me. I’ve recently started A Wizard of Earthsea, the first of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series. The deeper I get into this magical adventure, the more inspired I get to see how much I can discover within the confines of my one life and our little cherry bookshelf.

A black person sitting in front of a field of tulips, smiling widely. They have an afro and wear mint-colored glasses with a navy sweater and gray jeans.

Whitney Cooper holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University, where they served as editor-in-chief of Jelly Bucket, the graduate literary journal run by the university. They also work as a reader for Atlanta Review. A clerical error was made while earning their bachelor’s degree, and they have been passionate about poetry ever since. Their poetry appears in Glassworks Magazine, Stillpoint Literary Magazine, Calliope, Right Hand Pointing, and SHARK REEF. They live in Metro Atlanta with their partner, cat, and miniature schnauzer mix.

Sundress Reads: Review of Dinner in the Fields

Attracta Fahy’s Dinner in the Fields (Fly on the Wall Press, 2020) captures the essence of small moments, memories, and observations, revealing that a busy world can offer quiet moments of significance if you pause to notice. Fahy guides readers to places where time slows or freezes altogether, creating a space to reflect on the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary. 

Dinner in the Fields delves into intricately silent lives in the smallest town, laying bare their essence. In “Woman in the Waterside House,” Fahy writes, “I have no reason to trust sympathy, / when I tell you I hid for thirteen / days, waiting for marks to disappear” (8). Her storytelling ability demands attention for every word. Finishing the woman’s story, she writes, “Easier to pretend my life / is full, than to face the shame / in your eyes, mine, / and the shame of the world, / when you are a woman with a fist over your face” (Fahy 8). In a few short lines, Fahy produces incredible characters with rich pasts and emotions.

Between heart-wrenching stories, Fahy’s doleful images and moments prove literature’s potential as a cathartic tool for realization. In “Etchings,” Fahy writes, “There will be no miracles in a graveyard / amongst the dead, little happens / in the quiet presence / of departed souls” (10). Here Fahy creates profound stillness; her words convey the woeful narrative of the poem and also invite the reader to ponder existence. She reminds readers, in the setting of a still and silent graveyard, that life is momentary.   

In “Hy Brasil,” Fahy captures a narrator’s profound and all encompassing affection for a specific person by portraying it as a connection distinct from anything else. She writes: 

“Here on the mainland we are
unforgiving, overindulged, ignoring
the beauty.
I’m anchored, in love, tied like a boat
 to your image.” (Fahy 9) 

Fahy contrasts the mainland’s overindulgent nature by highlighting the tendency to overlook its beauty. The metaphor of being anchored in love and tied to the image of a beloved underscores the narrator’s deep commitment. Her ability to explain extraordinarily complex feelings through nature metaphors is one of the most notable aspects of the collection.  

Fahy also weaves themes of love, loss, and connects it to the relentless force of nature. In “How Did I Love You,” Fahy writes of the secret tragedies nature reveals about humanity: “Love took me to the last foot, / leaving shore, / my love deeper than that first step / into the depth, / the ocean, another land, / sweeping me off my feet, floating / to music, / your smile, / my death” (31). The imagery of moving to the last foot, leaving the shore, and the depth of love symbolized by stepping into the ocean creates a deepened idea of what it means to love.

Dinner in the Fields beckons you to go outside, even on less-than-gorgeous days—revealing beauty in all the places the wind has touched, where water has eroded, and in the spaces nature has reclaimed. Fahy reminds you how remarkable nature is in every word:

“When the stars dance
they arrive at night
in a sheet of sparkling
pleasure, into our heart.
My heart also moves,
raw and bright.” (Fahy 24).

Dinner in the Fields offers another way to look at the world: appreciatively, wistfully, kindly, and expectantly. Fahy paints vivid pictures of the powerful, beautiful forces present in a tree, a bird, a lightning strike. 

The combining, overpowering themes of nature and time’s relentlessness come to a peak in “It is 3am.” With the narrative of walking back from a bar with someone, Fahy turns a seemingly meaningless moment into a slow, beautiful experience. She writes,

“We slip into morning, walking Merchants Road,
our feet pace the moon, its timeless light, cloaks,
just enough to dull this truth: I was young once,
no need for fragile kiss, eyes that search
for depth.
… I would go anywhere tonight
… Still here, I slow to the beat of your steps, tall grey buildings
shadow our frames. We smile to each other, glance
at empty cars, parked like soldiers into little squares.
I’ve moved in circles, tasting paths to love
never found the one,
now there’s you.” (Fahy 25).

Her words remind you to be appreciative of every part of life, the beauty in every time of day. What is usually an hour of anxiety, hecticness, and unplanned disorder, Fahy’s version is slowed down, allowing your mind the opportunity to wander.

Ultimately, Attracta Fahy’s Dinner in the Fields is a truly powerful collection. One statement that well-represents the collection is from “Picking Potatoes:” “With tasks well done, / we believe in a greater life. / Longing connects us to fields / beyond our world. / We will grow into what we leave” (Fahy 27). With rich images and profound words, these poems force introspection and make for a highly engaging read.

Dinner in the Fields is available from Fly on the Wall Press

Caitlin is a young woman, wearing a blue and white striped shirt. She is smiling and has blue eyes and long strawberry blonde hair.

Caitlin Mulqueen is a senior at the University of Tennessee majoring in English and Journalism. She loves reading, playing piano, watching sports, and the Oxford comma. She has worked as an Editorial Graphics Production intern at ESPN, is a copy editor at The Daily Beacon, a student writer for Tennessee Athletics, a graphics and video operator for the SEC Network, and a marketing/social media intern for the Knoxville Ice Bears. With the majority of her undergraduate work being in sports media, literary media has remained her sincerest passion, finding stories that come out of sports to be as moving as those from literature.