2023 brought me my first BOOK DEAL

Hey.

It’s me.

We made it to the end of the year, pals.

Last year was the first time I noticed that the coldest winter weather doesn’t coincide with the solstice, the shortest day (at least in the northern hemisphere). There are weeks of little light, and then weeks of bitter cold. Same for summer: the solstice brings the longest day and the most light, but I don’t feel the hottest heat until the following months. Maybe the weather is different where you live, but it was true for me again this year and I found something beautiful in that: how it looks doesn’t have to match how it feels. (And how it feels doesn’t have to match how it looks.)

As a writer, I tend to have long, slow seasons of output that no one sees. Eventually, months or years later—when I’m further away from the self who made the work—it (that self and that work) finally meets other people through publication.

The oldest poems in my forthcoming poetry collection, Cosmic Tantrum, will be eight years old by the time the book is out. It’s a collection I wrote years ago, burned to the ground (excepting those few old poems), and rewrote hoping to match the kind of winking melodrama of the title. It’s absurd and serious, like a life.

Here’s the official announcement screenshot, with a collage-border embellishment of my making. I’ve been in these before as an editor, but never for *~*~my own book, as the author*~*~

By the time I was given the okay to share the good news on social media, I had already known for several months that the book would eventually exist in the world. I’d had my private peak-experience solstice-y feelings about it before I could share the news with others. Maybe that’s the way. We are asked to hold and process so much on any given day—often so much pain and horror, so much to fight against and live alongside and through. I got to hold this joy and let it gestate a while, and now I’m glad to share it with you to pick up and set down again, or file away in your mind for a better time.

Because December is a month for accounting, beyond the book announcement, here’s What Else I Got to Share in 2023:

• The Zürich-based art gallery Sgomento Zurigo commissioned a poem from me for their show, “Singalong,” featuring artworks by Ken Kagami and Anders Dickson. In addition to using the poem in the exhibition’s pamphlet, they hung it in the gallery!

• My press-mate Michael Chang invited me to read a few poems at the launch for their poetry collection, Synthetic Jungle. Books Are Magic recorded the reading.

• The Millions published my review/essay on Lucy Ives’s excellent novel Life Is Everywhere, Cyrano, Sarah Bernhardt, alter egos, and reality vs. “reality.”

• Taylor Byas’s brilliant debut full-length collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, which I had the pleasure of editing, was published in August and has already won the Maya Angelou Book Award and the Chicago Review of Books Award for Poetry!!

• With Summer Farah, I co-edited Best Debut Short Stories 2023: The PEN America Dau Prize and wrote an intro about art as “content,” the writers’ strike, AI art as “a manifestation of an authoritarian fantasy: an ‘artist’ that can’t say no, and works for free,” and how these winning stories are the result of each writer’s choices and refusals. This year’s prizewinners were selected by judges Venita Blackburn, Richard Chiem, and Dantiel W. Moniz. The winning writers are Dailihana E. Alfonseca, Ren Arcamone, Sonia Feldman, Stephenjohn Holgate, Faire Holliday, Mengyin Lin, Verity McKay, Clara Mundy, Jo Saleska, Annabelle Ulaka, Lisa Wartenberg Vélez, and Patrick J. Zhou. You can read interviews with the winners here.

• My essay on John Darnielle’s Devil House, homes with dirt rooms at their secret centers, and the nightmarescape of California real estate was published in Vol. 1 of the print edition of word west revue.

• Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s daring, touching, experimental memoir, Touching the Art, which I also had the pleasure of editing, was published in November. In a Between the Covers conversation with Mattilda, David Naimon describes the book in a way I love, as “speculative nonfiction,” a “beautiful gesture against, I think, the inevitability of history.”

• After many years of submitting work there (by postal mail!!), I was really honored to publish a poem in ZYZZYVA. “Baby Island” appears in their Fall Issue, No. 126.

• In honor of the Gemini Full Moon (and because I’m a Gemini Rising 😈 ), my tarot teacher Jeff Hinshaw invited me as a guest on their podcast, Cosmic Cousins. Jeff did deep reads of a few of my poems and explained how they relate to my astro chart, which was pretty sick.

• I’m slowly making paintings that correspond with my poems, with excerpts of the text pasted on, zine-style. I partnered with a local print shop that will print and ship any ordered through my website.

• And I read and edited over a million words this year in client projects—about 1.36 million across developmental edits and editorial assessments for novels, memoirs, story collections; copyedits, cold reads, and proofreads of novels and narrative nonfiction; book proposals; and misc. excerpts, essays, and stories.

I hope December is treating you as well as it can, and that you can linger for a while in this between-time of the end of the year. Wishing you catnaps (in lieu of hibernation) and hearty foods. Now that the shortest day has passed, each day offers a little more light.

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If you’re looking for feedback on a completed book-length manuscript, stuck-in-the-middle book-length manuscript, or individual story or essay, I’d love to work with you. You can fill out my contact form here.

Out now: I DONE CLICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES by Taylor Byas

It was an absolute honor to work on this collection with Taylor Byas, and I’m so glad everyone else can read it too and be floored by the power, grace, and agency of these poems. Taylor takes familiar forms and turns them on their heads, bends and sculpts them into something inevitable but surprising. Through it all, a clear picture emerges—of Chicago, of Black girlhood, of reclaiming the stories.

Inspired by The Wiz, this debut, full-length poetry collection celebrates South Side Chicago and a Black woman’s quest for self-discovery—one that pulls her away from the safety of home and into her power

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times takes its inspiration and concept from the cult classic film The Wiz to explore a Black woman’s journey out of the South Side of Chicago and into adulthood. The narrative arc of The Wiz—a tumultuous departure from home, trials designed to reveal new things about the self, and the eventual return home—serves as a loose trajectory for this collection, pulling readers through an abandoned barn, a Wendy’s drive-thru, a Beyoncé video, Grandma’s house, Sunday service, and the corner store. At every stop, the speaker is made to confront her womanhood, her sexuality, the visibility of her body, alcoholism in her family, and various ways in which narratives are imposed on her.

Subverting monolithic ideas about the South Side of Chicago, and re-casting the city as a living, breathing entity, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times spans sestinas, sonnets, free-verse, and erasures, all to reimagine the concept of home. Chicago isn’t just a city, but a teacher, a lingering shadow, a way of seeing the world.

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*A NATIONAL BESTSELLER*

Shortlisted for the Maya Angelou Book Award
The Millions, A Must-Read Poetry Book of Summer

“A buoyant blast of South Side love and ache, conversing with Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg, finding room for Harold’s Chicken and Claudia Rankine.” —Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune

“In prose both heart wrenching in one line and hilarious the other, Byas paints a portrait of life in Chicago with all of its ups and downs.” —Sam Franzini, Our Culture Magazine

“A literary descendant of fellow Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks. Like Brooks, the 27-year-old Byas turns the everyday aspects of life into the exuberantly extraordinary . . . Her collection is a love letter to the city that made her—and to her own journey of self-discovery.” —Diamond Sharp, Chicago Magazine

“With vivid imagery and a staggering wit, Taylor Byas paints portraits of her childhood on the south side and the city in warm hues . . . Byas etches out the beauty in the most mundane parts of Chicago with a reflective eye . . . I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times offers a weighty contribution to Black Chicago’s poetry legacy.” —Reema Saleh, Chicago Reader

“This impressive debut is a celebration of Chicago’s South Side, telling the story of a Black woman’s quest for self-discovery. Every poem is alive with the beauty and intimacy of growing up in the city . . . [A] stunning achievement whose lyricism echoes some of Chicago’s greatest poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks and Eve L. Ewing.” —Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

“It is impossible to understate the breadth and skill that Byas demonstrates throughout I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times . . . This collection is further proof that Byas is one of the most important voices in American poetry . . . We are experiencing a legend in the making.” —The Poetry Question

“[An] ecstatic debut . . . These nuanced and complex poems offer unforgettable snapshots of Black life in a vibrant city.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The poet uses her strong voice to deliver evocative, richly described snapshots . . . In this promising work, Byas tells an intimate story of growing up.” —Booklist (starred review)

“My fellow Chicagoans, rejoice. Taylor Byas’s poems are visually stunning and formally inventive. They give us more proof that everything dope does indeed come from Chicago.” —José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold

“So many of the greatest poets in the American tradition have been Chicago Black women and this debut collection is an announcement that one more has joined that proud tradition. Byas’s work unfolds with tender attention to all sides of life in the Black metropolis. From mulberry trees to daisy dukes to candy ladies to liquor stores, this work sings of the city that raised me in an authentic way, with a careful formal attention befitting the lineage of Gwendolyn Brooks. This is a work to cherish.” —Nate Marshall, author of Finna: Poems

“In The Wiz, Dorothy finds the song of Oz and follows it down the road, easily—Taylor Byas unearths that spirit-music, too, in her stunning debut, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. These poems illuminate Chicago, the body, the sweat of condensation on the Kool Aid cups cooling in the heat on a summer day in technicolor memory and careful music. It is the Chicago that’s there all along among the emerald streets, the self that is always there, the loud and frightening sparkle of a father’s memory, and the sharp edge of a lover’s rough touch. It is the shades of love blooming, green, across the South Side of Chicago. In fresh, inventive, and living formal verse and free verse, Taylor Byas paints the golden path, brick by brick, and we ease on down it.” —Ashley M. Jones, author of Reparations Now!: Poems

“Some collections attempt to build new worlds. Others return to old worlds and write them anew. Byas’ dive into the familial and the familiar is an intimate project, one that questions motherhood, love, and mourning in tandem. All this, in a Chicago that shole ain’t what this world tries to make of it. Taylor’s Chicago flexes and bristles and brims with life. In Byas’ work, Chicago is a/the world, one reimagined as a clever, raw, and beautiful character. Clever, especially so because Byas uses a vast toolbelt stocked well with forms and voice(s) and smirking candor. She tells us of and tells us the truth. Byas writes, ‘what we want has so little room to grow,’ yet all the while, makes room, makes room, makes room. Move out the damn way already!” —Aurielle Marie, author of Gumbo Ya Ya: Poems

Out now: THE TIGER AND THE CAGE and BEST DEBUT SHORT STORIES 2022

Cover design by Nicole Caputo; animation by Elizabeth Yaffe

The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis is poet Emma Bolden’s debut memoir. For readers of Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire and Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, this exquisitely wrought book recounts a lifelong struggle with chronic pain and endometriosis, while speaking more broadly to anyone who’s been told “it’s all in your head.”

With The Tiger and the Cage, Bolden uses her own experience as the starting point for a journey through the institutional misogyny of Western medicine—from a history of labeling women “hysterical” and parading them as curiosities to a lack of information on causes or cures for endometriosis, despite more than a century of documented cases. Recounting botched surgeries and dire side effects from pharmaceuticals affecting her and countless others, Bolden speaks to the ways people are often failed by the official narratives of institutions meant to protect them.

It’s a beautiful, harrowing read. Bolden’s poetic command of language ensures that, though we plunge into the depths with her, we never drown.

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“An intimate, eloquent personal history of survival and self-discovery . . . One of the most riveting and accessible accounts of the experience of pain you’ll read all year.” —Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon

“If pain is taboo, then the body becomes a very heavy thing. In The Tiger and the Cage, Bolden carries that weight in gorgeous, poetic prose infused with the kind of honesty that is difficult to turn away from . . . For any reader ever cast as the unreliable narrator of their own story, I suspect Bolden’s memoir will feel like a fierce, validating balm.” —Wynter K Miller, Electric Literature

“Bolden shines an unbearable, clinical light on how our desire to please, to be good, which serves us so well in school, can also lead to disaster . . . My sincerest hope is any woman—every woman—with medical problems no male doctor has yet bothered to really try and understand reads The Tiger and the Cage, a book that feels like the beginning of a new genre. There’s a guidebook, now. And a guide.” —Emily Van Duyne, Literary Hub

“Bolden’s memoir digs into the layers of sociocultural beliefs around menstruation, fertility, the expectations of women’s role to mate and procreate, and the indivisible links between sexuality, psychological security, desire, and self-awareness.” —Cat Woods, Shondaland

“[Bolden’s] lyrical descriptions and emotional honesty render this harrowing story hard to put down, and her critique of the medical establishment is both sharp and fair . . . A well-written, deeply researched, and searingly frank memoir about reproductive health.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Dark and riveting . . . [It] stings as much as it astounds.” —Publishers Weekly

“Emma Bolden’s The Tiger and the Cage is a memoir written as an investigation, a dive into what it means to be a woman caught in a medical establishment that doesn’t listen to women. I read this book in a fury. Bolden’s imagery is stark and vivid, and the prose moves in a spiral, encircling her pain, her confusion, and her strength. This book will make you laugh, cry, scream, and bleach your hair while you sing along loudly to Tori Amos. I am so grateful The Tiger and the Cage exists and so grateful for Emma Bolden’s generosity.” —Emme Lund, author of The Boy With a Bird in His Chest

“In The Tiger and the Cage, the call is coming from inside the house—or, rather, from inside the body. In the beautiful prose of a poet, Emma Bolden confronts the patriarchal foundation of the institutions that make our lives what they are: education, religion, medicine. If patriarchy—and frankly, misogyny—is part of medical ‘care,’ then via each surgeon’s scalpel and each prescribed medication, it is also inside us. The Tiger and the Cage opened my eyes, enraged me, and left me in awe of Bolden’s enormous talent as a writer, intelligence as a critic, and courage as a survivor.” —Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod and Keep Moving

“A harrowing portrait of endurance and grief and resilience. With raw honesty and exacting detail, Bolden tells an intimate story while exploring the demands our oppressive culture places on women—our supposed hopes and dreams, our supposed desires and fears, and most poignantly of all the expectations on our bodies, what they should do and how they should behave. It is part damning critique of our male-dominated medical institutions and, quietly, a loving tribute to a mother-daughter bond.” —Julianna Baggott, author of The Seventh Book of Wonders

“Layer by shimmering layer, Emma Bolden transforms the story of her body into the story of a search for truth. The Tiger and the Cage elegantly interrogates narratives of gender, pain, sexuality, and family to reveal the freedom underneath.” —Angela Chen, author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“In brief, lyrical, and powerful essays, Emma Bolden unleashes her story of endometriosis, and the misogyny she endured at the hands of the medical establishment, interwoven with stories of a supportive and loving Southern upbringing. The Tiger and the Cage is a torrent of feeling. It is a left-hook to the jaw to anyone learning for the first time about the neglectful ways women are often treated when their bodies need help. It is a soft, supportive whisper to those of us who know it too well. May it find its way into the hands of doctors and those in training, and their patients, too, who will find a voice in this book, one speaking with clarity and purpose, that affirms their own experiences.” —Chantel Acevedo, author of The Distant Marvels

“This philosophical, funny, and beautiful memoir is both a work of art and a deep conversation about the rift between mind and body, those two great friends, and rivals, handcuffed together forever. Well-armed with a genuine Greek chorus, a truly excellent and private sense of humor, and incredible gifts for metaphor, Emma Bolden opens the vault for the reader into the true experience of how it feels to both reckon daily with a ravaging illness and also to carry on and make the most of one’s life.

If literature is the great river that runs alongside life, interpreting it, then this book is that river—[it] is deep and vigorous and vital, flashing with transcendence, thinking so richly about the human body, wondering at its mortality and fragility with love and humor and patience and strength.” —Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and Other Stories

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Cover design by Nicole Caputo; Cover art by Sirin Thada

Now in its sixth year, the Best Debut Short Stories series is an annual anthology celebrating the winners of the PEN America Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers, which honors twelve short story writers on their first-ever published short fiction.

This was my second year co-editing with the wonderful Yuka Igarashi. This year’s judges were Deesha Philyaw, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Emily Nemens. The twelve honored writers, stories, and journals for 2022 are:

“A Wedding in Multan, 1978” (The Asian American Literary Review) Yasmin Adele Majeed
“All We Have Left is Ourselves” (Reckoning) Oyedotun Damilola Muees
“Beat by Beat” (Barrelhouse Magazine) Emma Shannon
“For Future Reference: Notes on the 7-10 Split” (The Cincinnati Review) Patch Kirschenbaum
“Man, Man, Et Cetera” (The Virginia Quarterly Review) Cal Shook
“Sacrilege” (BOMB Magazine) Edward Salem
“The Black Kite and the Wind” (Virginia Quarterly Review) Erin Connal
“The Cacophobe” (Ploughshares) Seth Wang
“The Chicken” (The White Review) RZ Baschir
“Them Bones” (Hobart) CK Kane
“Work Wives” (Typehouse Literary Magazine) Preeti Vangani
“Writing with Blood” (Flock) Catherine Bai

Best Debut Short Stories 2022: The PEN America Dau Prize is available here, and wherever books are sold. Catapult magazine’s Don’t Write Alone ran a roundtable interview with Deesha, Sabrina, and Emily; PEN interviewed each winning writer, with the whole series of interviews accessible here; and Hobart excerpted the intro that Yuka and I co-wrote. Other press at Lit Hub, BookRiot, and Debutiful.

Out now: BEST DEBUT SHORT STORIES 2021 and a li'l microchap

Being that it is solidly, pumpkin spicédly autumn now, it is long past time to announce some fruits of the summer literary harvest!

Cover art by Sirin Thada, art direction by Nicole Caputo

The Best Debut Short Stories series is now in its fifth year. This annual anthology celebrates the winners of the PEN America Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers, which honors twelve short story writers on their first-ever fiction publication.

I’m honored to be an official co-editor for the series, having been involved in some capacity since its inception in 2017. We celebrated with a new cover design, with art direction by Nicole Caputo and gorgeous original art by Sirin Thada. This year’s judges were Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Beth Piatote, honoring twelve debut writers and their debut stories:

“Force, Mass, Acceleration” (The Southern Review), Heather Aruffo
“Good Girls” (Barrelhouse), Lindsay Ferguson
“The First Time I Said It” (The Georgia Review), Isaac Hughes Green
“Maria” (Waxwing Magazine), Amy Haejung
“The Math of Living” (Virginia Quarterly Review), Nishanth Injam
“Transit” (Virginia Quarterly Review), Khaddafina Mbabazi
“Re:Frankie” (Porter House Review), Mackenzie McGee
“The Strong-Strong Winds” (adda), Mathapelo Mofokeng
“Salt” (Michigan Quarterly Review), Alberto Reyes Morgan
“The List” (Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art), Stanley Patrick Stocker
“Taxi” (Midwest Review), Pardeep Toor
“Mandy’s Mary Sue” (Sine Theta Magazine), Qianze Zhang

Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize is available here, and wherever books are sold. Catapult magazine is doing an interview series with all of the winners, which you can read here. Debut writers, nominations for the 2022 prize are open through November 15th, so ask your editor to nominate you if you’re eligible!

Digital micro-chap

Autocorrect Suggests “Tithe,” a wee chap of 10 poems, is available now via Ghost City Press.

Ghost City Press selected my digital micro-chapbook for inclusion in their 2021 Summer Series. If you're interested in poems as meditations, poems as trances, Baba Yaga, hacking into the mainframe, and repurposed public domain images, come on down! Available here for the low price of FREE, or you can hit that donate button.

Preorders open for THEY SAID from Black Lawrence Press!

Image courtesy of BlackLawrence.com

Happy National Poetry Month! I am pleased as punch to show you this beautiful-weird new cover for They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing—and more pleased than punch to announce that preorders are now open!! 

Poet-friend Isobel O'Hare and I co-wrote a poem that appears in here. You can read about our process in the back of the book once it makes its way to your hot little hands. The full list of contributors, advanced praise (including from the editors of ZYZZYVA—I swooned), and order link are in today's BLP announcement.

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Image courtesy of younginklings.org

In other Poetry Month news, Society of Young Inklings interviewed me as their resident poet for their monthly newsletter, the Ink Splat. You can read about me writing poems for online communities as a teen, gushing about Matthew Zapruder, and being inspired by young writers here.