Recently my poem “Dream House” was published in the March 2023 issue of Ghost City Review. I’d be honored if you read it and would highly recommend reading the rest of this engaging issue too. It contains so many great poems and stories! It’s hard to choose favorites. However, I’ll go with the three pieces that made me happiest (the first two in a traditional sense, and the third one because it inspires a sense of wonder — or at least it did for me): Amanda Ryan’s “Go to the Ant,” Rae Katz’s “Ode to an Inside Joke,” and Amy Marques’s “My Father’s Burgundy Pajamas.”

My poem is based on a series of semi-recurring, nightmare-adjacent dreams that I had for the first few years after my husband and I moved into our house. It’s an old place and had been somewhat neglected when we moved in. But it is a good place to live. My subconscious took its time internalizing that — and the actual layout of the house — though. The poem is a collage of those not-quite nightmares.

Read “Dream House”

Last month Bone Parade released their ninth issue, which features a collection of interesting—sometimes eerie, sometimes melancholy—poems and a fun short story about a debate between a pair of trick-or-treating siblings.

My poem “Familiars” closes out the issue—yay!

If memory serves, I actually wrote this poem on the same afternoon I wrote “Regrowth” (Rust + Moth, Spring 2020), but it took quite a while longer to find this one a good home. I’m so happy Bone Parade is the place for it!

I’d be honored if you’d head on over and check out Issue # 9. While you’re at it, I’d also recommend this prose poem from Bone Parade’s previous issue: “Graveyards Are Gardens That Embrace Those Who Lost.”

Every year since 1977, Bucks County has held a poet laureate contest for current residents. Past winners of the competition have come from many backgrounds and earned various other awards and professional achievements, including Guggenheims, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships, and a Pew Foundation of the Arts grant.

This year I was selected as one of the contest runner-ups. (Yay!) The award reception was on November 14, and I had the opportunity to read a couple of my poems (including “Regrowth,” which was published by Rust + Moth in 2020) alongside some very talented poets, including this yearʼs winner Nicole Steinberg, last yearʼs winner Jane Edna Mohler, contest judge Ernest Hilbert, and fellow runners-up Judith Lagana and Lynda Gene Rymond. The reading was a wonderful experience, and it was truly an honor to have the chance to read with this group of excellent local poets.

Congratulations to Judith, Lynda, and especially Nicole!