“I am a poet with a day job outside of academia, and the 2013 NEA Fellowship in poetry was an enormous vote of confidence and reassurance that after years of solitary work I was on the right track. Knowing that my poems had made a connection with a national panel of poets and arts supporters I had never met still pushes my work forward to this day. The fellowship gave me the financial freedom to help promote a new book, Electrical Theories of Femininity (Black Radish), attend a residency where I finished a new poetry manuscript, "Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners," and tamp down mounting medical bills. As much as the fellowship has meant to me personally, I am most proud to be part of the work that the NEA does to support and bring the arts in all its forms to rural and urban communities across the United States.”
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