To my friends & family, who have always lifted me up: So many of you are enthusastic & interested in my writing, even though you might not otherwise be invested in poetry. Thank you for your generosity. I love you. Special thanks to my cousin, Heather McCarthy, for sharing her time & research into the McCarthy family lineage. You opened up possibilities & pathways in this book that could not have otherwise existed.
To Travis Vignon: Thank you for your time & skill in creating the JavaScript elements that completed this book; and for your love & friendship these last 20+ years.
To Emily Hagenburger Keough: Thank you for lending your time & professional expertise to teach me the basics of book publicity.
Thank you to my teachers & colleagues:
- Dr. Marilyn Kallet for your unending support, enthusiasm, & attention to many of these poems, and for your friendship.
- Dr. Arthur Smith for the lessons I keep discovering you had already taught me. For the witnessing the fullness of this world's tragedies, joys, & everything between, and giving it back to all of us, augmented. I wish you could have seen this.
- Amy Kidd for advocating for me to gain my first professional position as a Technical Writer, and for mentoring me, encouraging me, & teaching me to read the damn pubLog.
- Tom Johnson for your excellent & generous contributions to the field of technical communication.
- Cebrun (Abe) Gaustad, Dr. Russel Hirst, Michael Knight, Dr. Bill Larsen, Dr. Ben Lee, Mary Ellen Miller, Dr. Kristin Robertson, & Wendel Werner for your work as educators, advocates, & mentors.
- Sandy Coomer, Craig Freeman, Christine Hall, John Winston Heacock, Henry L. Jones, Dana Malone, Ciona Rouse, & the Nashville poetry community at large for being excellent writers, teachers, organizers, literary citizens, & all-around human beings.
- Deborah Broyles, Dr. Damon Cathey, Dr. Sara Estes, Brian Francis, Dr. Richard Hatfield, Debra Smotherman, Robert Stackhouse, Dr. Griff Watson, & Leanne Wright of Metro Nashville Public Schools for teaching me to be delighted with learning.
- Especially to Dawn Leung, my 5th grade teacher at Jones Paideia Magnet, for refusing to accept less than I was capable of.
Thank you the following for their generosity, space, or inspiration:
- Alice Friman, whose craft talk & reading at UT in October 2012 (my first semester of grad school), became foundational to my writing, and eventually inspired the crazy ideas that led to this book
- Rockvale Writers' Colony, where some of these poems were drafted or revised
- The Virginia Center for Creative Arts in Auvillar, France, where some of these poems were drafted or revised
- Sundress Academy for the Arts
- The University of Tennessee Department of English
- John C. Hodges Library (University of Tennessee)
- The Gertrude & Harold Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series
- Rachel Zucker's Commonplace podcast
- Poetry in the Brew
- Black Dog open mic
- Electric Pheasant Open Mic (especially Ethan Palmer & Chris Barton)
- The Jekyll Team
- I'd Rather Be Writing
- The Jekyll Talk community (especially Michael Currin)
- Living Waters Brewing
- Retrograde Coffee
- Dose Coffee
The following journals & magazines published versions of poems that appear in this collection:
| Analog Science Fiction & Fact | |
|---|---|
| Beecher's (University of Kansas) | |
| Burlesque Press | |
| China Grove | |
| Connotation Press | |
| Gamut | |
| One Trick Pony Review | |
| Please See Me | |
| Poetry Salzburg Review | |
| Potomac Review | |
| Public Pool | |
| Rivet: The Journal of Writing That Risks | |
| Second Chance Lit | |
| Sinew: 10 Years of Poetry in the Brew, 2011–2021 | |
| Social Justice Anthologies: Recasting Masculinity | |
| Stirring | |
| The Bosphorus Review of Books | |
| The Human | |
| The Mildred Haun Review | |
| The West Review | |
| The Wild Word | |
| Thin Air Magazine |