Home is an Embodiment of Story: Unpacking time, racialization, and genre in Rosa Castellano’s “All is the Telling”

Rosa Castellano met with me on January 22, 2025 to discuss her beautiful debut, All is the Telling, available for pre-order and set to drop on April 5th. Together we discussed the process behind organizing manuscripts, time and its effects on racialized embodiment, all things Florida, the poem play, and more.  

Diamond Forde: Okay. Hello, Honey viewers, Honey listeners. I am really excited to be here today. My name is Diamond Forde. I am the interviews editor for Honey Literary, and I am currently in conversation with Rosa Castellano about her forthcoming debut book, All Is the Telling, which should be dropping on April 5th, but is available for preorder—likely by the time you see this interview—but also on February 1st, right?

So if you are intrigued by what you hear, you should definitely snag yourself a copy. Rosa, thank you so much for joining me today.

Rosa Castellano: I am so excited to be here. I think being the Interviews Editor sounds so fun. I read through some of the past ones, you get to meet the best people and—how do I apply for that job?

(both laughing) 

Diamond: It's really just a title that says “I'm really dorky. I love talking to other poets about poetry” and this gives me the permission to do that. Yeah, when Dorothy (Chan) asked me if I wanted to be Interviews Editor, I said yes because it keeps me accountable to doing the stuff that I like to do which is be in community with other writers. So, I wouldn't change it for anything else.

Rosa: No, I don't blame you. And you asked the best questions.

Diamond: Thank you. (laughs) Right. Okay, so to kick us off, I'm going to go ahead and ask one of those questions. 

So, the first question that I had for you, Rosa, is that All of the Telling is organized in six sections: “Once for Each Thing,” (an aside: I'm naming the sections for the readers)...”What Keeps Calling,” “Feathers Enough to Fly: a Poem Play,” “& Again,” “Just Once,” “& Never Again” with one section “Just Once,” encompassing a single poem.

I would argue this is pretty significant in terms of your organizational work for a poetry collection, especially for a first book, juggling so many distinct segments while still constructing a consistent narrative arc is just one of the ways that you demonstrate your incredible capacity for range in this book, Rosa.

I want to take a moment to ask you to describe what you see as the narrative arc of the book for our Honey readers who are thinking about picking up their copy. what motivated the choices between your sections, how did you discover the overall shape of your book, and what advice might you have for readers about organizing a manuscript?

Rosa: Okay. I am excited to talk about this and also slightly embarrassed because the section titles all come from a section of Rilke’s “Ninth Elegy” that was translated by Stephen Mitchel.

But the part that's embarrassing is because I misread it when I first encountered it, and I think that we all bring ourselves to the poems that we read—I believe very, very much that my collection will be finished by the people who read it.

And it allows me a lot of freedom to know that I'm putting this thing out there and that it stops belonging to me once it's read by somebody else, and so I hope that Rilke somewhere doesn't mind that I had the response that I had to his lines which were because “everything in this world needs us, this whole fleeting world.”

When I read that I thought, god damn it. (laughing) I think at the time, my children were younger—I have four of them and the things that I carry make it hard to be the best version of myself at all times, and the next line was like, “which keeps calling to us, us the most fleeting of all which I read as broken”—you know, and then he's like “it's once for each thing. Just once, and never again.” And that was so the opposite of true for me.

It's not—it wasn't once for each thing. I think lots of people who suffer and survived traumas with a big “T” and traumas with a small “t” know that things repeat, and sometimes we can lean in and be like, “oh, that's an opportunity for healing, yay.” And sometimes, it just feels like it's happening again. 

And so, I really wanted to refute this idea that it is “just once,” and so largely the organizing principle of the book was me working against against that idea. And also allowing myself my own reading of that work. And then leaning into the repeat, which is very fun as a poet, I think. 

In my book, there are maybe 10 or 11 “A Girl the Color of...” poems, and it's “A Girl the Color of a House on Fire,” “A Girl the Color of Starlight on Water,” there's all these different things.

And I was able to organize that repeat as part of the overall repeat. There's a lot of returning to childhood. The speakers of those poems are sometimes child—or sometimes children—a child version of myself, those poems.

I got advice at the very beginning, when I was putting my manuscript together. I went to “Under the Volcano” which is this very, very cool residency in Mexico which, if you are not familiar with, is really cool. They have workshops in Spanish and English—I do not speak Spanish, just for the record. (laughing) Just to say, it's not like easier if you do speak Spanish—it's open to non-Spanish speakers as well. But they do journalism, and they had a poetry manuscript, which a friend sent to me, and it was the first time they were doing it, so nobody else—they weren't sure they were even going to run the class—and it was Keetje Kuipers, who is this fantastic reader of work. She's the editor of Poetry Northwest, and she has a book coming out this spring, and it might be available for pre-order now, I'm not sure but it's Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, and it just seems really fantastic. I'm super excited.

But she had encouraged me to take all the persona poems out. And, at first, I was very nervous about doing that but “The Girl the Color of”, sorry to jump away and then return back, but those “Girl the Color of Poems” allowed me to have distance– for me, personally, from that speaker, but also to allow those speakers to say things. And in doing that... I think this is kind of a central idea—is dealing with the selves that we carry, allowing all of those things to sort of paper doll out. I'm a big fan of the paper doll as a metaphor for my own personhood. (laughing) I know that sometimes I'm able to meet moments as this sort of version of myself...which is to say this adult grown up, you know borderline professional, and not anxious or childlike, whatever.

And those parts are valuable, and in this book have voices that contribute to this narrative arc that ends, that begins with storytelling, and ends with storytelling. I don't know, I feel like that might be a little bit of a convoluted—

Diamond: No, not at all—

Rosa: —answer, but creating a book is a convoluted process. 

Diamond: Mmm. 

Rosa: When you organize your poems, just shuffle them again and you have a different long book length poem. And sometimes that's really fun and sometimes it's actually quite frustrating. So, I guess the advice I would give is to try to find folks who are in the same boat.

I'm actually going to teach a class this May, I think. It's a short four-week, stop dreaming and do it. I think there's a lot of folks—and Diamond, you probably know folks who've been writing for a little while, publishing for a couple of years, and they have a book. They have a book. I know they have a book. You know they have a book, but they don't know they have a book. Sometimes you know you don't know you have a book until you start laying those poems out and seeing how they talk to each other.

And I think, looking at other books—like Diamond’s book—(Diamond laughing) for inspiration on laying out your collection. What you do— I love what you do, where you take us from one poem right to the next and it's really just a long, a long poem together. Like, those two poems together make something different than those two poems singularly. There's so much good stuff in that collection—

Diamond: —sorry, the book is also in the legacy of what you were talking about—about not knowing you have a book until you lay it all out. That was another project that I didn't know I had a book in the works until I was able to lay it all out, so I appreciate you kind of seeing those connections and the way that it builds on itself that way and also kind of creating space to recognize that for other folks to I think that's beautiful.

Rosa: Yeah, well and that's all it is. I'm obviously not an expert—I only have one book. (laughing) It's not even out yet. But it is really just about making space. No one wants to have conversations about epigrams—like, “What do you feel about epigrams? What do you think? You think they work? Do I use epigrams more than once in every section.” No! People don't want to talk about that who are not working on a book.

So, you need space and the opportunity to be in community with folks who are wrestling with some of the same questions, and that's really all I'm trying to do, especially in that four week one. And then in the long one, we’ll read whole manuscripts in the fall. I'm kind of excited and curious to see what people show up with and then what they end up. That's always fun.

Diamond: That’s a beautiful path, and it sounds like it's going to be an incredible course, Rosa. I thank you so much for sharing that, and I would even say—if I can wax poetic—that I think the the misreading (of Rilke) was a sort of divinity. That it was exactly—you read exactly what you needed to read for this book to happen. And I would never think that that would be a misreading at all. 

Rosa: (laughing) Thank you for that. 

Diamond: For the second question that I have for you, as readers might have no doubt guessed from the fact that I listed the sections, time is an important organizational and thematic force within this book.

I found myself startled and delighted by the book’s resistance to—and maybe that's not the right word—its insistence on the simultaneity of time—that feels closer, more in line with the agency and urgency of the book—especially in poems like the book’s opener “Survival is Plural,” which I will quote in just a moment and how often the simultaneity of time is played into, on, and through racialized embodiment.

I am, of course, talking about the dichotomous dynamic of past and present but also most importantly talking about the presences of both the Black child and the Black adult throughout the book, two seemingly distinct markers of time and experience, and yet for the Black child, the process of racialization is also adultification, or the rendering of the child's body through sight, association, and treatment as grown.

See, for instance, the description of the six year old in the aforementioned poem, and I'm going to quote the poem, 

“...Her shoulders, 

the width of a man’s hand

wing as she walks

a hallway past those

who don’t see love laid

in the neat lines

of her braids”

Incredible, powerful, disturbing, unsettling. And of course, that dynamic plays vice versa in this book, shows that the Black adult can and is too often rendered perpetually infantile.

Take this moment in “On Survival or Hey Kitten Still Hanging in There?”—which is such a great title by the way—which reminds us that violence, necessary for the process of racialization, can collapse the here and now, can collapse within the adult speaker the (re)memory of her child father: 

“...because the emptiness/in my body/is person-

shaped/and passed down/from ancestor to ancestor/each

having shared beds/with the bodies of their dead/my father too/his child-sized body/tucked beside his grandmother’s/unbreathing form/all night”

I am hoping, Rosa, that you might speak more about the relationship time has in this book for you—what do you think is the relationship between time and Black embodiment? What might change in our understanding around time if we look at that connection? 

Rosa: That's such a really good question. And I love your word, simultaneously, simultaneously, I can't even say it—

Diamond: We’ll just say “simultaneous” (both laughing)

Rosa: But no, but I love it. Because what you're doing with that word is pushing the nature of simultaneousness to encompass a self-awareness of being in time, in more than one way, perhaps is the way to say it. You said “collapsing the here and now.” I think all of us have experienced those moments where our now is collapsed by our dysregulation, by a memory, by touch sometimes is enough to do it.

We exist in this state, in part because of epigenetics, part because this black body carries stuff, you know? It's carrying a lot. All black bodies are, I want to say simultaneously, both carrying and in the act of carrying. Potentially—not wanting to speak for others—longing to put some of the things down. We're carrying things that belong to us generationally. And that's an interesting idea. What do we do with the things that belong to us that come down to us through generational lines that's not a thing you just set down casually even if it's, in fact, a terrible thing. That more than anything you want to set it down.

I'm just saying, I think it's complicated. I think in general it is complicated to be a person. But Christina Sharpe’s book In the Wake—she talks about arrivals and departures as being this overlapping all the time, and again that overlapping of self. So for me, time—which I love that you pulled this out, by the way—time is in that collapsed moment. 

And I have no science talk (laughing). No science talk at all. I wish that I did because I think there is—if we had a third person who was a physicist or something, could make some connections between the way that real time operates, I think there's truth in what we feel. We know that. Like, your therapist or my therapist might say “feelings aren't facts,” and that that is true, but what's also true is that I have chills on my arms or that I cannot stop my heart from this rapid beating, or that my eyes are literally filling with tears. We are containing these things simultaneously while we're existing. And I know again, that's being a person. And yet, it's complicated and difficult and challenging and beautiful and wonderful.

And I think if we can own that time, that presence, like being present isn't just putting my feet on the floor. Like I wish it was! Like I would, “hold on, let me be present!” Do you know what I'm trying to say? You can't just—I can't... And I know that, yes, put your feet on the floor. There's value, lots of value, and I will put my feet on the floor (they're not right now) but it's not a simple thing to be a person in time.

And you're like, duh. That's how I feel about the characters in this book, the real people in this book, myself in this book. I'm living in my own layers while I'm writing these poems.

And I think that's important for BIPOC folks in particular. For survivors of trauma in particular. Or for people who are in a relationship, which is everybody, with those folks–to understand how time is working and enacting on this body in this moment. And to make a little space, because being present sometimes invites the question, which present? 

Diamond: That's incredible. Oh my god. And with such astuteness, too! Thinking about not just how the body is affected by time, but how the body even expresses time. Some of the ways that—literally, time exists simultaneously in the small and minute actions of the body. Incredible, incredible, thoughtful, and the kind of thoughtfulness that exists already within the book you crafted it with so much care, Rosa. Thank you for that.

I want to think for a moment about the symbology of wings here, which plays a metaphor throughout the book in key moments where the speaker or subject hopes to escape, the wings then become the impetus for that fleeing, even if the impetus is just a wish.

And though it also reminds us about the necessity and legacy of travel, this book traverses quite a few spaces throughout the American South, which is really impressive. Maryland, Florida, the swamps and cities of Georgia, just to name a few.

And while some of the landscapes might ring familiar, so that we might know—and I'm going to quote a section from the poem “I’m not where I’m supposed to be, Okefenokee Swamp, GA, 1882”: 

a place belonging

more to cottonmouths than to cotton root

and to the swamp-song winging

over the water”

Just...I wish I wrote that (Rosa laughing)...we are also consistently reminded that the Black Subject can either be made wholly unfamiliar to these places, or worst, made so familiar that these landscapes speak always the painful song of our history—“[speak] the language of lynching, a language / taught to the trees” which is from another poem in the book (“Red Summer Souvenir for the Postcard Dead”). 

It is impossible to know where we are supposed to be in the United States, hell, the world—and yet this book responds to that impossibility by placing the Black subject in so many anywheres.

In light of all that I've said, can you tell me a little more about the importance of place, and in particular the American South, to All is the Telling? And how did you include—or how did you know which places to include and explore within the book? And are there other places that you think the book travels that I haven't mentioned yet?

Rosa: I think for me, and for what I was attempting to do in the collection... it has a lot to do with belonging.

So, the title, "All Is the Telling" is supposed to speak to, at least for me— An umbrella that I'm using is this idea of story. The stories we carry, the stories that tell us who we are, and home is almost an embodiment of those stories, you know? Like, "Oh, that doorknob, I remember that time." "Oh, that." You can look at any place in the space that is the place that is most your home, the place that feels the most like home, and sometimes that's your childhood home or not.

And so, I'm from Florida, and even though I haven't lived there, because I've been a grown up for a really long time, I don't - I'm bad at math, so I can't actually tell you how long it's been. I just can't—

Diamond: No math here!

Rosa: —figure it out. I can't figure it out. (laughing) But I carry those spaces with me. 

I lived in Vermont for like nine years, and there's only one poem, which I wasn't really writing so much then either, because I was - I had four kids in five and a half years or something. (laughing)

But also, like, “oh, so wonderful,” but also, like, I couldn't—that wasn't a space for writing for me, and so half of that was in Vermont, but I don't have Vermont poems is the point that I'm trying to make. Vermont never felt like home to me, for lots of reasons, and some of which have nothing to do - aren't bad at all. It's a beautiful place.

But Florida is a place that I carry inside. And the Georgia in this poem is on the border, and it's very similar, and I wanted—

Florida, as part of the South, is a special place too. The way that it's geographically - it's different than the other parts of the South. Historically, in terms of how slavery operated is very different there. And not better or worse or anything, it's just different, and it feels different in lots of ways.

So, I wanted Florida to be part of this collection, like, because it is part of me. And so there's oranges everywhere, and palm trees, and sunsets, and  modern kinds of considerations, like baked ziti at a beach. Who does that? My family. Fucking hot! (laughing)

Anyways. Historical Florida. Florida is one of those places that still has - or at least it feels like it - has a wildness to it, if you drive through New England and you look at the wild trees crying alongside the highway. Those have been cut and planted and cut and planted so many times that the wildness is no longer there. And while in Florida, hurricanes knock them down, and then they just overgrow themselves.  There is - there is still a wildness in that landscape, and a dangerousness in that landscape.

I think lots of folks who write about Florida cannot escape that - that there is a danger in the landscape. And I think a lot of writers of color can't escape the danger in the landscape.

And it's not just because of Florida, but Florida, it's different. It's just different. And so I wanted - I definitely wanted that feeling for the book.

The poem play, the girls in the poem play do follow a little bit the path of Migration. There is something about that Migration that belongs to all of us in different ways, that we've inherited from our relatives and ancestors who either didn't migrate or did migrate, and what that means for our individual families and selves.

I wanted to point a little bit to migration as an individual moment. Not what it costs, but what it gives us, the gift of it.

I know for me, I forget sometimes because there are parts of that story that aren't really great, that are in fact, you know, folks hoping for something and ending up in situations that are worse in some ways, opportunities aren't where they're supposed to be. I don't want to—we all know what I'm talking about, I think.

But there is still the sense that if migration had never happened, Denzel Washington would never have been an actor. (laughing) And I don't know him personally, you know what I mean? But I do know that opportunity because we have Blackness in all these new spaces that things are changing and things happen. 

Anyways, I just wanted to nod, not to the big story, but to the small story a little bit in that poem play section. Even though she's passing, and it's a whole complicated situation on its own.

And the value of staying. There's two sisters, one passes for white and the other stays. And the choices that they make. One ends up staying on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp, and all that that sort of implies, you know, that sort of earthiness and grounding, but also like swamps are not really the best places either (laughing).

Diamond: I love that. I love the way that those threads came together in your response as well, thinking about all that we've been talking about already with time and place and when you said that Florida is the home that lives in your heart—it feels like that within the book, that we are simultaneously tying the idea of time, even though Florida is a part of your past, it is still very much present within you—thinking about home being a thing that we hold within us, thinking about, again, that embodiment and its attachment and tie to all of these things, especially racialized embodiment—all of that feels beautifully tied together.

And you were talking a little bit about your poem plays, and I kind of want to go ahead and shift and talk about that a little bit. As someone who is a fat poet, (laughing) and therefore deeply invested in the malleability of genre, thinking about what that means, I like how much the poem play at once harkens to other contemporary writers who are also dabbling in the same playground—I was thinking immediately of Airea D. Matthews’ Simulacra, Anastacia-Renee, who I interviewed recently, also did some of this work in her works, too.

And I love the poem play in particular because of the themes that it opens up, especially in connection to the title of the book, which I'm so glad that talked a little bit about—what All is the Telling means.

And I think that the connection between them asks us to pay attention to the complexities, necessities, and intricacies of narrative both in the book and outside of it. That it's just as important who tells the story, but also how they tell it.

Do you want to talk about the poem play a little bit more, who it stars? You kind of talked a little bit about the two essential characters, and the sort of the navigation of passing that happens within their story, but what also why you felt like the poem play was a necessary addition to All is the Telling?

Rosa: Yeah, I just wanted to ground the book in historical context, both in terms of the journey that I'm personally on as being one that's, you know, doesn't just belong to me, but also in terms of the stories that we carry inside our bodies, whether we have knowledge of carrying them or not.

But also when we do have knowledge... what it means to belong to a legacy of passing? What it means to belong to a legacy of estrangement? What it means when we live in a community where, historically, love is something that's dangerous?

So, I wanted a space to unpack those feelings and thoughts and to give voice to these—they are imagined characters—but for me they bring to life very real moments.

There's a lot of poems in the book that are about my family. You know, there's moms and dads and brothers and sisters that show up. I'm bringing this up to say, not every single poem is true, is carrying, containing a true story, but the feeling inside that poem is 100% true. And that's how I feel about is about the two sisters in this poem and their story.

And to your point, I do think I think you're right. You know, I mean, obviously, yes, it matters, who's telling the story. But with the play, even though it's on the page, there's an invitation to see, to visualize these speakers in their bodies, and what that might look like.

I visualize it as a very plain stage, just the single speaker, which is why there are no stage directions. I tried it. It didn't work. You know, like “she's hanging up laundry.” I am actually not a playwright at this time. (laughing) So, it felt very clunky and intrusive because what was really important is just centering the story that each character that comes on stage—it’s just the two sisters who want to tell this thing that they can't tell anybody else because they're no longer in contact with each other.

And so, yeah. I think the play as opposed to just a poem invites readers to really see the speakers.

And I, again, love that when you read a poem, or in this case, you're seeing a play in your head, but you get to pick. You get to pick what they look like. And I think there's a lot of freedom in that. 

And I think I think the poems work on their own, just for the record, but I love that you get to bring as a reader your mom to this poem or your grandma to this poem or your sister to this poem or that lady at church whose voice sounds like this speaker's voice. I love that. I think it's important because that's how the story is supposed to work. It's not just supposed to belong to me. At least that's my hope, you know. And I think the play allows for that a little bit.

Diamond: Well, Rosa, you may not be a playwright right now, but you will be when this book drops.

Thank you so much for sharing your time with me. I only have one last question. It's a kind of common question that I end these interviews with. What are you working on now? What's next? What projects are occupying your space, if any? What's on your brain these days?

Rosa: So, the last poem in my collection. Well, it's my real last poem. The actual last poem is really just a hug. Like, it really is. It's a hug for myself. It's a hug for you. Thank you for reading this book. We're all going to be okay (laughing).

But the second to the last poem makes use of Danez Smith's super awesome poem, "I'm Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense." And so, the title is “I'm Going Back to My Childhood where Yelling Makes Sense.” And then there's the poem, and then it's haunted by all the “Girls the color of” who show up in the book. She kind of haunts this last poem and says, “tell me a story. I don't care if it's true.”

So, those two things are sort of sitting with me in different ways. One has to do a little bit with the fact that I'm now parenting teens, that I would like to go back to my childhood where yelling is allowed (laughing). But also, what does that mean? Like really unpacking—it’s  a lot about me as a mother, and what I want for my kids and for this world.

And then, “tell me a story, I don't care if it's true.” I'm very interested in, I don't know, the fiction. Maybe it's part of where we are in the world. Like, what are the stories that we need to make the world that we want? And so it's not true yet. I don't really want to write a novel. That's not really it, but I am curious about the blank page as a container to hold our imaginings for this world that we all sort of want but looks different, and I'm sort of curious about what that means and what that could look like. Maybe some collaboration. I'm just in this space. 

And I am finally writing again things that don't go in this book, but I feel like that started last week. (Diamond laughing)

It's been a journey to get here, but I am excited to keep going, for sure. And before you are like, “oh and thank you for coming.”

Diamond: Yeah!

Rosa: I have to ask you an important question. 

Diamond: Hit me! 

Rosa: It's really important to me. I don't know if people who watch this know that you are like—they probably know—that you're an excellent writer, and hopefully they have read your book, but you're also an excellent reader of your work and are fun. Like, just, it's fun. Even though your work is hard, we feel it, it's also wonderful to be in your readings, and I got to hear you read a couple years ago when you came to my town, and you did your Jolene—you did the poem where you invite the audience to sing the chorus to Jolene, and I don't know which poem it is (laughing) and I really want to know, so that I can do it in my head while I'm reading it.

Diamond: (laughing) So, that one is actually not in Mother Body and even my forthcoming book, it's not in that one. It was in that one, and then I ended up having to pull it out. So, the only place that you can find it right now is in the "Let Me Say This" anthology, which is a Dolly Parton anthology, a collection of poems around Dolly Parton. But I am hopeful that that will appear someday in some collection, maybe even the work that I'm doing now around Outkast. Thank you so much for remembering that reading! (laughing)

Rosa: It was fantastic! The whole audience just leaned right in. Which is what we want, you know, it was fantastic!

When is your collection coming out? Do we have a date yet?

Diamond: Yeah, so we don't have an exact date, but we do have the year. It will officially be coming out in spring of 2026 with Scribner Books. 

Rosa: That's exciting! You know I run a poetry festival, right? It’s in April, so maybe that will be something cool to happen. You're only in Tennessee, right? 

Diamond: I'm in Asheville, North Carolina right now. 

Rosa: Oh! That's even closer. Okay, interesting. 

Diamond: (laughing) Thank you Rosa.

Rosa: Thank you so much, and thank you for your questions. They were so good and so fun to think about. I read them out loud to all of my children, separately. Like hey, come see what this really smart person is asking me!

Diamond: Ah! I love that! They're going to be really excited to see this interview as well, I'm sure, so they can see your brilliance shine, too. 

Thank you for sharing your love, your light, and the passion of your work with us.

Honey listeners, you need the copy of All Is the Telling. I promise you, you will not regret it. It is an incredible debut. Few debuts are as incredibly talented as Rosa's is. So please, please do yourself a favor and secure that copy.

Thank you for joining us, Rosa.

Rosa: Thank you for having me!

Diamond: Alright, Honey, be well!

About Rosa Castellano

Originally from Tampa, Fl, Rosa Castellano is a poet and teacher living in Richmond, VA. A finalist for Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship, and co-founder of the RVA Poetry Fest, her poems can be found or are forthcoming from RHINO Poetry, Diode, Passages North, Nimrod, The Ninth Letter, and Poetry Northwest among others. She has an MFA from VCU and her debut poetry collection, All is the Telling, will be out this Spring from Diode editions.

About Diamond Forde

Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received numerous awards and prizes, including a Pink Poetry Prize, a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. A Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow, Forde’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more. She serves as the interviews editor of Honey Literary, the fiction editor of Nat. Brut, and she lives in Asheville with her partner and their dog, Oatmeal.