Category Archives: Publication

The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman: Year 1

I feel like I should wish a happy first birthday to my three chapbooks that were published last summer, but then that’s not quite right. They were born long before they were published. Maybe publication is more of a coming of age than a birth. Maybe this is an anniversary.

Regardless, I’ll start with the first…

Happy first year of publication to The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman! This collection was the first intentionally unified, researched-based collection I ever wrote, yet the persona poems manage to capture more of my own faith/doubt than any overtly autobiographical poetry I’ve written.  It will always be special to me, and I’m glad that it was the first to be published.

Cover - The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman

During this first year, I especially loved sharing these poems as the featured poet at PLNU’s Poetry Day last September and as the keynote speaker for Biola’s Zeitgeist Conference in May, and, of course, I loved wearing my Jesus costume at the AWP bookfair to get people to stop and talk to me about this book.

Poetry Day - Reading Q&AJesus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was also thrilled to have a poem from this collection, “Where Death Is Not an Is,” featured on Verse Daily in September.

Thank you to everyone who bought this chapbook, read these poems, listened to me read these poems, talked with me about these poems and the stories behind them, reviewed the collection, interviewed me in print and podcast, and stopped to talk and take pictures with Jesus/me. I’m so honored to be able to do this work.

If you haven’t yet gotten a copy of The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman, you can still do so from Amazon or from Wipf & Stock. Or better yet, you can buy it straight from me and I’ll sign it for you. 😉

A Week in the Life

The past week has been full of wonderful poetry-related stuff…

On Tuesday, I finished drafting the first section of my biblical fragmentation project, tentatively titled All That Remains, and I realized that I’m doing a really strange sort of lectio divina. I’m looking forward to submitting some of these poems to literary journals in the coming week.

On Wednesday, I had my favorite haiku I’ve ever written accepted for publication in an anthology from Chuffed Buff Books.

On Thursday, my morning began with coffee, bagels, and good conversation with Nicelle Davis, one of my favorite poet-friends. Then I got to have lunch with Brett Foster and attend his poetry reading that night, which was wonderful. It’s always nice to meet another friendly poet. Also on this day, I had a poem accepted for publication in The Wallace Stevens Journal.

Today, I heard that The Emerald Issue of Fairy Tale Review is going to print, and it includes my poem “No Place Like,” in which an aged Dorothy is obsessed with painting everything green. I was pleased to get a shout-out in the press release, and I’m so excited to read this Oz-themed issue!

I could really use more weeks that are this full of productive writing, good news, and fellow poets!

Anthology of Ekphrastic Poems

I’m pleased to have three of my art-inspired poems published in an anthology called In Gilded Frame, just out from Kind of a Hurricane Press. Follow the link to the press’s website to read the free ebook version or to purchase a print copy.

My three poems in this anthology are “How to Appreciate Art” (inspired by Jessa Huebing-Reitinger’s “Courtnie” painting at the Johnson County Library), “Symmetry Drawing 72” (after M.C. Escher’s painting of the same name), and “The Museum Bowl” (inspired by the 2010 Super Bowl and the wager between the teams’ city museums).