Kelly Grace Thomas: Boat Burned

Kelly Grace Thomas is the winner of the 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, a 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Next nominee. She currently works to bring poetry to underserved youth as the Education and Pedagogy Advisor for Get Lit-Words Ignite, and as an active screenwriter and young adult author. Boat Burned is her first full-length collection of poetry, released in January 2020.

In this interview, Kelly Grace Thomas talks with Hannah Lazar about how she got into writing poetry, her writing process, the aspects of her life that influenced her poetry, the ways poetry intersects with other mediums of storytelling, and what she hopes to accomplish with her latest collection.

H: I noticed that you’ve done other writing (namely screenwriting and an upcoming YA novel), so is there anything about poetry that particularly attracts you to it?

K: So, I initially wrote some really horrible poems when I was in high school, as an angsty emo teen, and then stopped at the time. Though, I’ve always had the mindset that I wanted to be a professional writer, because there’s nothing cooler than to be paid for doing the thing I love. So, I went to Emerson College in Boston and studied for a degree in Literature and Publishing. There, I learned how to write fiction, journalism, and memoir, and I took one poetry class. I was really into fiction and thought I would do that and worked as a journalist for a number of years after college, for a local San Diego newspaper group. The job was great, but I found I didn’t have any energy to write for myself when I got home at the end of the day. So, I quit and decided to get my teaching credential, and I eventually taught at Triumph Charter High School in Los Angeles. When I was there, the principal encouraged me to use the curriculum of a poetry non-profit called “Get Lit: Words Ignite.” Through the program, you teach it for three months and then take a group of kids to a poetry competition. I had always wanted to do that with my students, so I was like, “Yeah, I’m in 100%!”

This ended up being my first real introduction to poetry!

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Annelyse Gelman: About Repulsion

Annelyse Gelman is the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone (2014). She was the inaugural poet-in-residence at UCSD’s Brain Observatory in 2012, the 2013 Lavinia Winter Fellow at New Pacific Studio, and a 2016 Fulbright recipient in Berlin for her work with the intersection of poetry, music, and film.

Her poetry-films have been screened in Germany’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, the FilmPoem Festival in Antwerp, dotdotdot in Vienna, Arcanum Video & Animation Festival in Slovenia, and the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival. Her work appears in TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, the PEN Poetry Series, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.

About Repulsion is a collaborative EP between Annelyse Gelman and programmer Jason Grier, exploring vulnerability and intimacy through samples from Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Max Ritvo, and Carl Phillips, and rigorous production mechanisms from overloaded CPU chips to rattled ice. Through this EP, Annelyse and Jason explore the meaningful intertwining and intersecting of word and sound.

In this interview, Annelyse Gelman talks with Margaret Zhang about obtaining spontaneous field recordings, meeting Jason in Berlin, writing for an EP rather than for the page, and building Midst, a digital platform for writers and readers to share their authentic creative processes.

MZ: What does the record name About Repulsion mean to you?

AG: The record is thematically concerned with intimacy and violence. Risk and vulnerability are at the heart of any close relationship, but there’s also an inherent paradox in the tension between wanting to know others and to be known by them. If someone comes to understand you, it can become more difficult to change because, in changing, you will become something that they don’t understand anymore. So there’s this tug between attraction and repulsion—people wanting to know each other without that knowing becoming a kind of trap.

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Best of the Net Nominees

We’re happy to announce our nominees for The Best of the Net anthology! These pieces had a major impact on our editors and we’re excited to share them.

Poems

Habitat
Michael Schermerhorn 

Toof
Imani Davis

Demolition in the Tropics
Rogan Kelly

Lake River Lake
Lilace Mellin Guignard

Halcyon
M. Wright

When I’ve Run Out of Coffee And/Or First-Person Plural
Andie Francis


Fiction

Give Me a Love Song
Melissa Goode

Saturnalia
James Smart

Creative Nonfiction

Cutting Open the Cat
Manda Frederick

My Country
Tracey Lien

An Interview with Yiyun Li

“There is a clear-cut: old life, that’s old country, and here there’s new life, new country. it is an advantage. You are looking at life through an old pair of eyes and a new pair of eyes. And there’s always that ambivalence—where do you belong? And how do you belong? And I do think these are advantages of immigrant writers or writers with two languages or who have two worlds.”

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An Interview with Lisa Zou

Lisa Zou has been recognized by The Poetry Society of UK, National YoungArts Foundation, Johns Hopkins University, and the Poetry Society of Virginia, among others. Her work recently won The Lindenwood Review Lyric Essay Contest and Honorable Mention for The Atlantis Award. A native of Arizona, Lisa currently studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and her poem “Prodigy” appeared in Penn Review’s Issue 49.2. 

Q: When did you start writing and why? What role does writing currently play in your life, and how has it changed over time?

I was introduced to poetry at a young age and memorized many Chinese poetry pieces. My writing was first published back in my city newspaper in elementary school; the poem was about happiness and probably the most cringe-inducing piece of work I have ever written or read. The newspaper awarded me a gift card, and I was hooked; from there, I started winning writing competitions in middle school, but they were all pretty local.

I spent some time in boarding school in China and had to take English Second Language classes when I moved to California. My English was awful and I was actually teased for my accent. Because I did not have the ability to vocalize my thoughts, I wrote everything down instead.

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