News

Tennessee Williams Fest 2024: Craft Series Speaker!

I look forward to seeing you all at this year’s Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Fest / Saints and Sinners. I’ll be giving a craft talk on absence as form on Thursday, and enjoying the rest of the fest. Find the full schedule here!

Sweetbitter Nominated for Eric Hoffer Award

Congratulations to the winner of the 2023 Eric Hoffer Award! I’m so proud to announce that Sweetbitter was nominated for this prestigious award. Thank you to all who champion this little book!

Sweetbitter Review in RHINO POETRY

"Ultimately, Sweetbitter gives us a catalog of wants for the world: what it could give, as well as what we could give back, in a sustainable interdependency. As so much of the collection is about knowing what couldn’t be known before, it’s a marvel that Balkun’s speaker doesn’t come from a place of regret, but from one of deep astonishment for the world. "THANK YOU to the amazing CT Salazar for this review of Sweetbitter in the newest issue of RHINO! I'm floored. I'm forest floored. Read the whole review here.

Sweetbitter listed as a Best Poetry Book of 2022!

I’m so grateful to the astonishing poet CT Salazaar who has listed my debut poetry collection Sweetbitter as a Best Poetry Book of 2022, along with poets I admire, like Jos Charles, jason b crawford, and Maggie Graber. What company to keep! Read more online at Annulet Poetics Journal.

January Workshop: The Unsaid, Absence as Form

The workshop we know and love is back for 2023. Join us in the new year as we explore The Unsaid: Absence as Form. As an instrument must have a resonating chamber in order to a sing, a poem, too, depends on empty space. “In a field, I am the absence of field,” wrote Mark Strand, speaking of his presence as disturbance, as rupture. The absence of one element can amplify the meaning of another. In this four-week, asynchronous workshop, we will explore absence in poetry, from ellipsis to erasure. We will write poems with blank space through which implication and meaning will resonate, using the void (like a voice) to pronounce and echo. Learn more on the Poetry Barn’s website here.

Dodge Poetry Festival 2022

I am so thrilled to be invited to the Dodge Poetry Festival! I will be reading and contributing to conversations about Ecopoetics and Poetry and Identity in Newark, NJ this fall. See you at the Dodge!

New Workshop Alert: The Poetic Sequence

Poetry is not synonymous with brevity. Some stories take more time to unfold, and some topics require more than a few stanzas of rumination. How can verse form extend across multiple pages? What makes a poem’s multiple sections add up to more than the sum of its parts? What depth and variation can white space add to a long poem? What patterns can we identify, and later work from? In this four-week generative poetry course, we will read a variety of long poems and poem sequences and study their fabric and stitching. Together we will craft our own long poems or poem sequences, drawing from some of our own older works as well as starting from scratch through a variety of generative writing exercises. Offered online, asynchronous at The Poetry Barn (sign up here).

Is this crazy?

The Arizona Poetry Center recently published my new piece: “Radiant lyre speak me / become a voice”: Revising With Our Ancestors. Here, I discuss what it was like to revise a poetry manuscript using Sappho as my main confidant. Is it crazy to ask questions to a book—even if she answered?

BEST ONLINE POETRY CLASS 2022

Y’all, I am floored that my Poetry Barn workshop on The Contemporary Ode was once again listed as one of the BEST online poetry classes of 2022. Thanks to The Balance Careers for compiling such a thoughtful list of online creative writing workshops—I am honored to have my work included. Sign up for self-paced poetry workshop The Contemporary Ode here!

Poet & Artist Interview: Kel Mur

"I don’t know who said this, but there is a quote that goes something like, “art makes it possible to dream while you're awake” and I feel that poetry does the same thing. I feel the two art forms are siblings, really. I think ‘good' art has poetry to it, as in it has a rhythm, a feeling, and a part of it that is hard to describe." —Kel Mur

So grateful to Kel Mur for this conversation about art, poetry, and coming of age in a toxic environment. Learn more about the art behind SWEETBITTER (Sundress Publications 2022) here.

Sweetbitter Review in Mom Egg Review

“The genre of this collection is unique, partly coming of age, partly eco-poetry, with that fairytale surrealism, and even a touch of horror and filmic play.” Much gratitude to the brilliant Ava Silva for reviewingSweetbitter for Mom Egg Review Literature & Art! Read the full review online here.

“Duality & Hidden Meaning in Sweetbitter”: New Interview with Tiana Nobile

“Sweetbitter is very interested in subtext and hidden meaning: what are the stories we’re being told in the media we’re exposed to?” Tiana Nobile asked some great questions about Sweetbitter. Read more of our conversation about poetry and poetics over at The Southern Review of Books online here.

New Radio Feature on The Reading Life

Much gratitude to Susan Larson of The Reading Life for interviewing me on WWNO 89.9 FM! Hear our conversation about Sweetbitter online here.

Scholarship Recipient: Getaway To Write Florida

I’m honored to receive a scholarship to attend the Murphy Writing Seminars Getaway to Write — Florida conference this March! Find me in gorgeous New Smyrna Beach, where hopefully there will be time between poems to sneak in some sailing. More information about this amazing conference is online here.

Sweetbitter now Available for Preorder

Sweetbitter is due out February 1 from Sundress Publications! Visit the online store here to preorder your copy now.

Bear Review Michelle Boisseau Prize Runner-up

“Lure” was chosen by poet Hadara Bar-Nadav as the runner-up to the inaugural Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize! Congratulations to Megan Merchant and all of my fellow finalists. You can read the issue here.

Towards Being Together: To Those Who Were Our First Gods

I’ve got a new post up now at the Arizona Poetry Center. Reflecting on Nickole Brown’s chapbook, I write about how communication takes practice, and how the way to understanding is through one word: mercy.  Through language, we can strengthen our connection, to nature and to each other. By practicing mercy, Brown reminds us, our household strengthens. We’re all in it together. Read the post here.

Rewilding out now!

I am thrilled to have a poem in this anthology of eco-poetry, Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, out now from Split Rock Review. Rewilding features the work of 116 established and emerging poets. Contributors include 12 poet laureates, such as Joy Harjo, current poet laureate of the United States, and the work of renowned writers like Ted Kooser, Ada Limón, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Camille T. Dungy, Sean Hill, Craig Santos Perez, and many more. I am honored to have a poem among these ranks! More info here.

Sweetbitter finds a Home with Sundress Publications

I’m thrilled to announce that my full-length collection, Sweetbitter, will becoming out as part of Sundress Publications’ 2021 catalogue! Learn more about this fantastic press here.

New Post at the Arizona Poetry Center

Poetry is a strange art form in that it is always demanded to “do” something. When a friend gets married, people demand a poem; when disaster strikes, we need a poem. Can poetry help us understand? In his essay “After Sustainability,” Steve Mentz reminds us that literature has always been interested with the liminality between stability and disruption, often using the ocean as an image of such. Melinda Palacio’s poem, “Mermaid Don’t Drink the Water,” published in Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry, encapsulates Mentz’s theory. Read more here.

Congratulations to Winners of Terrain.org’s 10th Annual Contest!

I am so humbled by the kind words Camille Dungy has shared about my work, which has been chosen as the winner of the 10th Annual Contest from Terrain! About my three poems, Dungy says, “In lines that are riddled with visual gaps, drastic line endings, and striking syntax, the poet tells the stories of what might become of a body born in such a place. I am as interested in the formal and linguistic playfulness of these poems as I am in the deadly seriousness of their content. To be human, after all, is to seek beauty and joy, to reach for love and connection, even here, on this polluted and imperiled planet. Especially here, these poems insist.” Read more about this contest and the other winners at Terrain.org.

Climate Change, Power, & Poetry

In light of the tenacity Greta Thunberg has shown during her travels to and through the US, I’ve been thinking about climate change, power, and poetry. It feels like more poets than ever are writing about environmental issues than ever before. When I think of poems of climate change, I think of the word “breakage”—the world is experiencing such destruction and we’re as attached to our history of writing the natural world as we are separated from it because of the sense of destruction or urgency or even failure. Who has the power to enact change? Does poetry ever exercise any power? At the Arizona Poetry Center’s blog, I consider these questions in the light of poems by Camille Dungy and Hila Ratzabi. Read more here.

Upcoming Online Workshop: The Contemporary Ode

November 4-December 1, The Poetry Barn (online)
Lewis Turco defines an ode as “any poem that celebrates an event or a person,” going on to describe the three “more or less strict forms” an ode can take. Perhaps contemporary poets owe it to Pablo Neruda who conceived of the ode as an homage to anything (and everything) around him, but recently, odes explore any and everything. This four-week generative course is a crash course on the 21st and 20th century history of the ode. We will examine the expectations set by titling a poem “Ode” and investigate a diverse selection of contemporary odes (such as those by Fatimah Asghar, Ross Gay, Thomas Lux, John Murillo, Angel Nafis, Sharon Olds, Patricia Smith, and Kevin Young), exploring the craft elements that make a contemporary ode—especially those on unexpected or mundane subjects—successful before setting off to write our own.

Talking Writing Poetry Prize: First Place

I owe this poem to the Wurlitzer Foundation and Thomas Centolella of the Taos Poetry Retreat. Though this poem was drafted in a fifteen-minute writing prompt offered by Thomas, it is informed by months of research into the environmental history of the neighborhood in which I grew up. We played in those woods and swam in those polluted waters, but we were taught to fear abstractions. This poem is my reckoning with the natural world post-human influence as well as with my girlhood. I’m so grateful to Neil Aitken and the Talking Writing team for giving this poem a home! Read “Eulogy Ending in Red” here.

2019 Best of the Net Nomination

I am so honored that Menacing Hedge has nominated my poem, “A Short History of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits” for inclusion in Best of the Net 2019! Congratulations to the other nominees, Imran Kahn, Tamsin Blaxter, Emma Cairns Watson, Marlin Figgins, Awuor Ongura, Annie Blake, & Forrest Brazeal. Read the poem here.

“Perhaps the World Ends Here”: Reflections on a Favorite Poem by Joy Harjo

I’m so grateful to have a blog post live at The Arizona Poetry Center’s blog, 1508, about one of my favorite poems. We recently welcomed Joy Harjo into the role of US Poet Laureate, and so in celebrating her, here are some thoughts on her poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here.”
We sit at the kitchen table to unload our heartache, to bandage our cut fingers, and to slice vegetables. We brush the crumbs away, refill our cups, and open mail. After all, the kitchen is a space of ritual; of sharing and nourishment. It is the space where change is born through the nurture and passing of knowledge from generation to generation.Click through to 1508 for the full post.

Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry

The anthology Catherine Moore and I have edited is out now from Liminal Books! This extraordinary collection brings together poets writing in the fabulist tradition: fable, myth, fairytale, or magic. Both an introduction to and a survey of the ways women poets reclaim the domestic sphere and define a genre, poets representing all regions of the continental U.S. and abroad spanning four continents find home here. Contributors include Kelli Russell Agodon, Jennifer Givhan, Miriam Bird Greenberg, Carol Guess, Akua Lezli Hope, Colette Inez, Melinda Palacio, Susan Rich, Martha Silano, Cecilia Woloch, and many others.

 Carmen Maria Machado, multi award-winning author and Guggenheim Fellow, says, “Every page of Fiolet and Wing brings some new magic: birds and blooms, fairy tales and fabulism, the border between the domestic and the wilderness, the dream and nightmare of womanhood, the home as prison and liberator. I love these fierce, vibrant, luscious poems.” Get your copy (print and e-edition available) here!

New South 2019 Poetry Prize Announcement

I am honored to be awarded the New South 2019 Writing Contest Poetry Prize! About my poem “Bloodline,” Natalie Eilbert says: “The difficulty in contrapuntals is the planning it requires, understanding already the full breadth of its shape, knowing—at least in an abstract sense—its tenor and melody. It's a metaphor reverse engineered, operating in threes. I love "Bloodline" because it offers this difficulty with control, ease, and finesse. We feel its origin story in the chasm of meaning, between "I was born" and "guilt, skinned," between "a rib, a dozen ribs" and "a sonnet of bone caging." This poem's quest for meaning makes the contrapuntal a perfect form; our names grow beyond what we are called, we are the subversion of our identifiers, and this is what charges our anger and our love for a deity, a figure that looms beyond our names. This poem is also its resistance to any one fixed metaphor. We watch as they deny their own guesswork, then double-down on it: "womb, a bat, no a"...The womb cannot be a bat, we see this in the real time of the poem. It can be either "a / colony of bats" or "a / whole sky of bats." Better yet, The womb is the single bat, the colony, and the entire contents of the fluttering bat sky. It is the electability of this poem that brings us to earth, where it beholds a beautiful, terrifying future.”
This poem is in fantastic company. Check out the Finalists and other winners here.

CD Wright Women Writers Conference 2018

I’m excited to be joining the CD Wright Women Writers Conference in Conway, AR on November 10 to both present on ways women use the fairy tale in contemporary poetry, and to read selections from my long poem, “From The Book of Red,” which won Second Place in the 2018 Nan Snow Emerging Writer Awards! More info can be found here.

Best New Poets, 2018

“Wolf-Girl” will be published in Best New Poets, 2018. She’s in good company; check out the complete list of finalists here, and learn more about this annual anthology here.

2017 Women's National Book Association Poetry Prize: First Place

I'm honored to announce that my Little Red Riding Hood remix, "When I Am Red and the Moon, Full" has been awarded First Place in the 2017 Women's National Book Association Prize! Click here for more details. 

Two Chapbook Elgin Nominations

Both Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak AND Lost City Museum have been nominated for the Science Fiction Poetry Association's annual Elgin Award for books published in 2015 & 2016! Read more about the prize, and wish these book babies luck!

Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak a Local Bestseller

I'm thrilled that Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak has been named a 2016 bestseller at local bookshop Tubby & Coo's--and in great company.

Eight Fresno State Alum Release First Books

Jackalope-Girl & Lost City Museum are in great company: this year, eight Fresno State alum have celebrated their first books--a record.

2016 Pushcart Nominations

I'm so grateful and proud to announce that Porkbelly has nominated my poem "Love Letter to Galileo: Axis" (forthcoming) AND ELJ Publications has nominated my poem "Abandonarium" for the Pushcart Prize! You can read "Abandonarium" where it was first published on Devilfish Review here. 

"Gretel at Menlo Mall, 1996" Wins Second Place

My fairy tale poem has placed second in the SFPA's Annual Contest for a short-form poem. Read the entire poem, along with the other winners, on their website. 

Poem Feature on Verse Daily

My poem "Rift" is featured on Verse Daily's Web Weekly! This is one of those dream accomplishments. SO many thanks to Tinderbox Poetry Journal for having faith in my work! Click here to see it, in good company! 

BIG News! "Self-Portrait as Surrealist in Mexico (2015)" is a Finalist

"Self-Portrait as Surrealist in Mexico (2015)" is a Finalist for the inaugural Real Poem Prize from Workhorse & Rabbit Catastrophe! Congrats to all the other finalists!

New interview with Catherine Moore

Check out our dual interview on what domestic fabulism is and our new anthology project on Trish Hopkinson's blog, now live here.

Guest Blog on Mockingheart Review Now Live

Many thanks to Clare L. Martin for inviting me to think about how fabulist elements can help a writer tackle difficult subjects! Now live on the Beats Blog here.