Coming Out (as a Poet)
I don’t have much formal education or professional experience as a creative writer. My B.A. is in music composition, and I’ve spent the last decade of my professional artistic life working first as a performing musician, then as a music educator and audio technician, and most recently as a composer and music producer for an award-winning technology company that produces educational apps for children with learning differences. I own my own music publishing company as an independent recording artist, but I’ve barely published as a poet. In my late teens and early twenties I worked as an ESL instructor and literacy tutor, but my professional title has never been ‘writer’ and certainly not ‘poet.’
Yet, I’ve spent two decades writing poetry and have written hundreds of poems. I don’t have an exact tally. I have accordion files of diaries and notebooks, external hard drives containing folders titled "Poetry”, and hoards of cloud-stored documents on apps like Evernote and Google Docs. I have a mess. I’ve only submitted poetry for conventional publication a total of nine times, have been published three times, and am waiting to hear back on two. That’s four rejections so far. Four. It’s true, I have yet to earn my title in the trenches of literary rejection.
Before the release of Vision & Verse I hadn’t conventionally published a poem since 2014, and the time before that was as an eleven-year-old in an anthology called A Celebration of Young Poets that my fifth grade class contributed to as part of a poetry unit in school. The day I received my copy of that anthology was the day I first saw my writing in print, carefully formatted on a page of this most respected and cherished of items—a book—and fell in love with an impossible dream I’ve spent my entire adult life avoiding at the behest of my artistic mentors. Their good advice has always been “whatever you choose to be when you grow up, don’t be a poet.”
Vision & Verse: A Fusion of Poetry, Prose, Art, and Photography
My previously unpublished poem “One with Nature” appears on page 98 of Vision & Verse: A Fusion of Poetry, Prose, Art, and Photography, a new ekphrastic poetry anthology by California Writers Club.
On Tuesday, July 16th Vision & Verse hit #1 in New Releases in Poetry Anthologies on Amazon…
… and #5 in New Releases in Poetry
“Welcome to the inaugural issue of Vision and Verse, a Fusion of Art, Photography, Prose and Poetry. The multi-talented artists and writers featured within these pages have come together to create a dialogue between their respective mediums. This collection showcases the beauty of visual art married with the magic of the written word. In this celebration of imagination my wish for you is to immerse yourself in these pages and join in a journey where the boundaries of art and writing are blurred. The images and words are like rooms of memories, evoking anecdotes to be remembered, maybe even a treasure trove of inspiration for your own very unique expression. We sincerely hope you enjoy the collaborative work in Vision and Verse from the gifted members of California Writers Club.”
Order your copy HERE
Proceeds benefit California Writers Club
