We spend so much time talking about the frustrations of poetry--from the perils of revision to the difficulties of publication--and so little time talking about how lucky we are to be poets. Once, during a fight with a lover, he... Continue reading

Tonight I attended a ceremony for the 27th Annual Larry Neal Writers' Awards, a wonderful program the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities uses to honor Washington's child, teenage, and adult writers in the genres of fiction, essays, dramatic... Continue reading

Sestina: six six-line stanzas that use a common set of endwords, culminating in a tercet incorporating those same six endwords, with the endwords appearing in a prescribed order. Sestina: a 12th-century form invented the the troubadours, particularly Provençal poet Arnaut... Continue reading

Once, a friend was giving me feedback on a poem that would appear in my first collection, Theories of Falling. He had concerns about the leaps of narrative that my draft was making, the wild associations between image and intent.... Continue reading

This past Sunday, I read to about 70 people at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC. I couldn't have asked for a better audience: friends, poetry lovers, old high school English teachers, former bosses, and my grandmother (in the pink... Continue reading

Red, green, blue horses, I wrote, ride up and down. I paused, wondering how to complete my ode to carousels. Up and down, I scribbled a second time. Repetition was poetic, right? Our third-grade teacher circulated the classroom, reading over... Continue reading