Katie's Blog

So... Here's my official announcement, dear readers! Lamar University Press will be publishing my next poetry collection, Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots . I am over-the-moon excited for this. Its tentative release date is September 1st, which is incredibly soon. To launch the book, I will be presenting at the Langdon Poetry Weekend in Granbury, Texas. The book will be available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and I will likely have an armful of books wherever I go :-) So how did this come to be? Well, let's take a journey down memory lane, shall we? It was late 2011. I was feeling this mixture of elation and depression about the acceptance of The Garden Uprooted . It's a little tough to explain, but my first book was something I had cherished and worked on for years, all my years in grad school and beyond. It was my identity as a poet. And it was out of my hands, gone. I needed something new to obsess over, something new to strive for, so I began writing. I

So this poet is pretty proud today, well, yesterday, but I just got around to writing this today because... well, reasons. Anyway, the first issue of Amarillo Bay with me as poetry editor was published. You can check it out here. So what does the editorial process of a literary journal look like? Well, now that I'm so experienced (hehehehe) let me shed a little bit of light on the process. The whole thing began oh, about three months ago in May. I got the "job" and my first task was, of course, slush sifting, which means, of course, going through a bunch of unsolicited submissions in search of gems. I started receiving said submissions right away, and each time my inbox was full, I have to admit, I felt a little excited and honored. Poets from all over the world (and I can say that because some dude sent me a batch from Brazil!) were sending ME their poems to read. My process for slush-sifting looks like this: I read the batch of poems. The ones I knew weren't