O, New Endeavors?
Here's to still doing new things
I think the worst thing anyone can do is give me a new platform to yap on. However, seeing that I am a man with audacity and no one has stopped me, here we are. If you’re here, I appreciate your attendance. I hope this is a newsletter that finds you well, and if not, then I hope it finds you at all. Feel free to fight it off with a stick.
I’m gonna be honest: if you’re looking for a Substack with something insightful to say, I promise this isn’t it. I have much smarter and better-written friends you can follow if that’s your speed. Instead, I hope to keep y’all updated with what’s going on in my professional life (which you’re welcome to skip), what’s happening with my friends’ lives (which I hope you’ll check out), and the work going into my brain (that will hopefully inspire something better to come out). More than anything, I want to be in conversation with y’all. I just wanna talk.
It is likely I will try to send this out monthly, but it could also be less frequent than that (you’re welcome). If that isn’t enough me for you, find me on the social apps, or ask me out for coffee. I’d like that.
First Things First: I’m Married!
This is something that seems to throw people off every time I post about it, but the rumors (several Instagram story posts I’ve made) are true: I am married now! We got married on the first day of Spring, when the weather in New York decided it would cooperate with us. I’ll admit, it still feels very new to say that I have a husband at the ripe age of 26, but I couldn’t be more glad to be on this journey with him. For those of you that don’t have the pleasure (yet) of knowing him, he really is everything you can ask for in a partner: he’s kind, he’s funny, he’s smart, he writes, he can cook, he is handy around the house, and he’s started me on a skin care routine that keeps me from drying out, as I am prone to do. Also, he’s gorgeous. You could say I’ve won, and I wouldn’t disagree. For those of you astrologically inclined, he’s a Taurus. I’m an Aquarius. You can tell me our odds later. Unless they are bad, in which case, I rebuke it. Please keep any negative energy to yourself.
I wish I had something wise to say about the whole business of marriage, but the truth is, we’re both really young. We are still figuring out what we’re doing with our lives and what that will mean for our futures, but we’re committed to doing those things together. What I can’t emphasize enough is the joy and blessing of having a strong community to surround ourselves with and bring into our love. Time and again, our friends and loved ones have shown up for us, and it’s made all the difference in our personal relationship. It takes a village!
In other news, if you’ve perused the rest of this Substack publication (pubstack?) website, you’ll notice there is a ~podcast~ section. Right now, this means absolutely nothing, and I’m not sure if it ever will, but I’ve always wanted to do a podcast with this title that focuses on poets thinking through different craft elements, processes, and the work that keeps them writing. Who knows if I’ll ever do it, but hey, if no one stops me, maybe you’ll get an episode or two.
Have any craft elements or themes you’d want me to start with? Guest ideas? Want to collaborate with me on actually making this thing a, well, thing? Hit my line. Until then, check out We Killed the Moon, a podcast produced from some poet friends of mine featuring some pretty sick guests.1 The first episode has both Sharon Olds & Tariq Thompson, two great poets at the low low cost of your regular music streaming service subscription.
What’s Going On? (with me)
Generally, this is where I’ll be updating y’all on the stuff going with me, which recently is quite a few things! If you already know this info: Sorry! I’m bringing folks up to speed 🙏🏾
Most exciting news is that my debut collection, The Laughing Barrel,2 finalist for both the Alice James Award and the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, was picked up for publication by Alice James Books and is slated to release April 2027. If you pre-order from the website, there’s a 20% discount :)
I was awarded an NEA fellowship! Career-wise, this is pretty big pretty early, so I’m super humbled and hope that the work lives up to the weight of the honor. They couldn’t share our statements on the website like in previous years (we were told they didn’t have time to add them with the office’s current staff), but I wanted to share again what I provided:
This honor comes at an interesting point in my poetry “career.” Last Spring, I was blessed to graduate from an MFA program that aided immensely in my development as a writer and, more importantly, as a member of a literary community. Two short months following, I lost my dear stepmother, one of the biggest supporters of my work, all the way back to the silly little sonnets I scribbled in middle school. Though I’ve been writing for a bit now, I am still emerging and figuring out where my work fits into the larger scheme of literature. As I contend with that, I also contend with the daily realities of the ongoing genocide in the Levant and Africa, personal grief, and the ever-present loom of capitalism. And all I can do is laugh. I hover mostly around a poetics of disbelief, which is to say, most of my poetry starts at the point of looking at something and saying, “What the hell?” Though my work is tinted by my experience as a Black person and is often concerned with the realities of Black people, I am interested in the ways we all manage the absurdities of being alive in the present, absurdities like racism and capitalism and state-sanctioned genocide. On some level, we are asked to normalize these absurdities, and I hope my work will make people scoff at the idea of normalizing these things. I want people to question what they’re asked to condone and what they’re personally willing to condone for their comfort. I want people to laugh and then ask what the hell is so funny, really? I am grateful for this gift from the National Endowment of the Arts and hope it will help my work find the people that resonate with it.
I am a 2025 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference Writing Fellow!3 This conference historically leans towards prose/non-fiction folks in its programming and focus, so I’m looking forward as a ~poet~ to engage with work that’s different from how I’m usually writing.
My poem “Thermal Imaging” won the 2025 MQR Laurence Goldstein Prize. This a poem that came to me while me and my former roommates were watching Planet Earth and David Attenborough was talking about the equipment being military-grade. I think it would benefit more of us to stop and consider why the military might need certain technologies (like cameras that can zoom in from miles away) and who that technology might be used against.
On May 23, I’ll be part of a panel for the Brooklyn Poets Poetry Festival, talking with a few other poets about the responsibilities of language production under empire. Far be it from me to ask you to pay to see me talk, but if the rest of the festival’s programming interests you, consider coming through!
What’s Happening? (for my friends)
I’ll be using this section to put y’all on to the things happening with my friends in the poetry world (and other genres too if I’m paying attention). Lucky for us, there’s a lot of good stuff on the way!
Jonny Teklit has launched a new pubstack, Writers & Their Hobbies, “a series that seeks to interview your favorite writers while donating to important causes.” Check it out!
Summer Farah’s4 full-length, THE HUNGERING YEARS, “a collection exploring friendship, deep longing, and the complexities of place,” is forthcoming from Host Publications in Spring 2026. Summer is also the author of I Could Die Today and Live Again (Game Over Books), which uses The Legend of Zelda as a vehicle to explore themes of empire and cycles of death and rebirth. An all-around great work for those interested in ekphrasis or good writing.
Maya Salameh’s sophomore collection, MERMAID THEORY, which examines “the interconnectedness of science and myth, tracing the memory of water…, and interogatting the politics of witnessing,” is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in 2026. Maya is a phenomenal young writer who also wrote How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, a formally experimental and syntactically rich book that won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.5 She is also, transparently, a good friend, and I couldn’t be more excited for this book.
Karisma Price was recently named a 2025 Whiting Award winner in Poetry for her collection, I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books). If you haven’t already read it, I love this collection, and it was one of my north stars as I wrote TLB. The first time I came across Karisma’s work was reading her poem “My Phone Autocorrects Nigga to Night” in Poetry Magazine, which struck me so much that I pasted it to my wall and wrote her a DM telling her how much I loved it, to which she very graciously replied. A terrific book and well deserved award!
What I’m Reading (and how I’m reading it)
If you’ve been following me on social media, you’ll know I’ve been posting my tiny book reviews in an effort to keep myself accountable to regular reading. This will serve as an extension/continuation of that effort, and will hopefully put y’all on to some new books (or let you hype up collections you already love.) Something you’ll notice in these reviews is the “collection” archetype tag.
This tag comes from a craft talk given by Franny Choi at the Watering Hole (which you should apply to if you are a poet of color). If you want to look into it more, you can check out this Google Doc where I tried to synthesize each archetype, but basically Franny presented us with four kinds of collections poetry books can fall under, which has been helpful in my consideration of how different books relate to each other. Not every book will fall under one of these categories, and some might overlap, but it was a helpful start for me to think about books in comparison to other books. I hope it will be for you, too.
1) Birthright by George Abraham
Genre: Poetry (Debut)
Archetype: Speaker’s Journey/Essay
“Yacoub calls it a genetic anomaly. A miracle of God.” - pg. 42, “in which you do not ask the state of israel to commit suicide”
Whenever I finish reading a non-fiction book, as I did before starting Abraham’s collection, I hope for the next thing I read to jumpstart my brain back into wonder about what language can achieve. How lucky I was, then, for this book to be next on my list. Birthright is a collection that is rich with invention. I appreciate the way Abraham’s work resists and works outside of linearity, prompting us toward an evaluation of history that operates outside a simple cause & effect, a history that trips over itself and the many attempts to erase it. This collection, however, does not shy away from naming the violence and its actors that make poems within possible. Much of the work here asks us to re-examine the violences that happen daily and uphold the regimes that perpetuate them. What, if anything, can language do to combat empire? The work in this collection is strong, varied, and formally expansive. It reminds us that history did not start yesterday or with the state’s account, and history’s memory is often short and incomplete. It is up to us to interrogate the spaces “official” histories have left unfilled.
2) More Salt Than Diamond by Aline Mello
Genre: Poetry (Debut)
Archetype: Speaker’s Journey
“I translate the oath to Portuguese…/ she asks if it’s a prayer/ I say yes.” - pg. 36, “Studying for the Citizenship Test with my Mother”
A great collection full of strong & accessible verse. Mello’s collection is a great look into the thoughts & worries of one of our most vulnerable populations in this country, our immigrant neighbors. The dream this country peddles is built on promises it often fails to keep & security it reserves for few. Mello’s poetry shows us the struggle with being away from one’s home, and the sacrifice made to make a life for one’s self. A good collection to share and discuss with students and to start conversations about immigration and immigrant narratives.
New Poems in the Catalog
Now, on the off-chance that I’m keeping up with my self-imposed projects, I have a catalog I created to try and organize poems I come across and enjoy. I want to use this as a tool to gather poems to talk about and review for different craft or thematic concerns, and I think it helps me to consider how I might theoretical approach different poems or put them in conversation with each other.
See a poem on there that you think can be added to more themes or that has a craft element I didn’t notice? Let me know :)
“The Mare of Money” by Roger Reeves
“American Sonnet: 91” by Wanda Coleman
That’s all for this first entry! Thanks for rocking with me, looking forward to seeing where this thing leads.
I am also technically in one of these episodes talking a poem that was, at the time, in progress, but I do not remember which episode it was. I could just ask, but this is more dramatic. RIP.
If you so desire, you can also watch the three-minute presentation I gave on the thinking behind the manuscript for a university competition. I won first place with it. NBD.
I’ll admit: I had no idea what this conference was before I got the invite LOL. But! they got my name from Ocean (Vuong) and I am not one to turn down a free trip, so I look forward to updating y’all on the experience.
Summer also has a pubstack, evening conversations, you should check out if you’re a fan of Supernatural.
congratsss on the marriage! My partner is also a Taurus so I have faith in y’all’s odds 😤