Recovering and Book Launches!

Hello all! Happy summer.

I hope this missive finds you well and that you've all been able to relax a little bit as the temperature climbs up and up and up-----preferably somewhere with AC and a good book.

On my end, June is shaping up to be a month of recuperation: I finished the second year of my Ph.D and my coursework and am now gearing up to start reading for my qualifying exams in January. Now this is jumping the gun a bit, perhaps, but with the field I find myself in, where there are more doorstoppers than there aren't, you can never be too early. My fall semester will be dedicated to refining these lists of materials and then in the spring, it's dissertation prospectus time. It's a wild time to be in the morass of academia generally speaking, but it's equally wild to realize that, if all goes according to my ironically-titled 5 Year Plan, that I'll be 60% done with my degree by this time next year. It feels like I just started here; it feels like I've been here forever.

The end of semester list I've made every semester of my higher education since freshman year at Bryn Mawr College. Done is good, good is extra!

But the moral of this interlude is that I expended a massive amount of energy during the past nine months and it's finally caught up with me. I have spent more time than not sleeping and blearily stumbling from place to place, and I, who woke up more or less at 9 a.m. today, needed a 30 minute nap before my work shift started at 1 in order to be halfway coherent. And we live in such a go-go-go society that anything that deviates from the plan clangs an extremely discordant note in my brain. But I have a goal for this summer, and that's just to let my brain simmer down just a tad. Can't pour from an empty cup, can't think from an empty brain (?).

But just because I've been in hibernation mode doesn't mean that there hasn't been any movement. Indeed, there have been some really exciting things going on! So let's get into it.

Reuben Gelley Newman's debut poetry collection, DEAR DEAR, out from Trio House Press in July 2026. Preorder here.

First and foremost, I have the great pleasure and honor of moderating Reuben Gelley Newman's launch event at The Strand in NYC for his phenomenal first poetry collection, DEAR DEAR on July 1st. Reuben is a rare type of poet, a writer whose attention to sonics and image inspires in every line, but also Reuben is a rare type of friend. We go way back. We were interns at Copper Canyon Press in the Fall of 2020, and although we could only interact through a video call, their kindness and dedication to uplifting poetry stood out from the first. I consider it one of the major accomplishments of my life that they continue to put up with me and our relationship as friends and colleagues in poetry has only gotten stronger over the years. I can't wait to do this event with him, and I hope to see all my NYC based friends there.

In other exciting writing news, I have a short story out in the current issue of the minnesota review! Do you like ghosts and queerness? Well, come on down!

Give the full story a read here. This one more or less came out in one gush, sort of like a baby horse being born, all legs and no hope, and it remains incredibly close to my heart. How fitting then, that it came out just in time for Pride Month. My writing wouldn’t and couldn’t exist without the grace women have given me in loving them. And I'm getting more comfortable by degrees in writing into my queerness and not letting it play second fiddle to my straight-passing relationships, which have, admittedly, dominated the historical narrative. Queerness is a thing that haunts, and that provided me with the framework for this story almost immediately once I started thinking about it.

In an adjacent vein, the Chile Novel develops apace. I've been at home in the DC metro area visiting family and have taken the opportunity to turn my week-long stay into a writing residency of sorts in my mother's library, which she turned my old bedroom into. I have no complaints, it's gorgeous, and I get to cuddle with the family cats, Puck and Tybalt, who keep me company and eye my chair so that when I get up to do such superfluous human things as use the bathroom, they can rise up and steal my seat. But they're cute.

This part of the novel writing process is proving to be a bit of a balancing act between my expectations and the reality. And the reality is, now we're getting to the part of the story where I have to juggle the narrative around the historical events and concepts I don't know that much about. So for instance, my goal this visit home was to write a chapter for one character who was going home to Barcelona while her husband and his brother are tracking their mother down in Chile. Simple enough, right? However, this character is an artist, influenced by the confusing trio of Kandinsky, Gaudi, and Dali, and I don't know enough about how to write eloquently about their artwork to pull off the chapter's action convincingly. What's a girl to do?

Well, the answer is pivot to what I have more of an awareness of, but that means that instead of artspeak in Barcelona, I'm having to write about Pinochet and the secret police in 1975, because at this time that's what I can write about and have it come off as realistic (and even that is subject to intense research I'm doing concurrently.) As it stands, we're up to 61,400 words, and the goal is to hit 70K by the end of the month.

July and August are full of excitement. Family reunion in Costa Rica in July and then I'm off to the Kyrgyz Republic for three weeks in August to conduct dissertation research. The good folks at the Jordan Center at NYU have given me a summer fellowship to conduct it, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit scared of going by myself, taking the initiative, but this is what I'm in a Ph.D program to do. If I'm going to study this, I have to do it right. I don't have the option to be scared. It's a challenge. I'm good with challenges.

I'm planning on having some dispatches from Bishkek up on the blog during that time, so stay tuned. Hopefully I'll have some more to share with you before then, but if I don't, see you in August.

K.C.