Welcome to SAD ME OF THE PAST, the podcast where we officially start celebrating Spooky Season on August 1st. Today we have poet Donika Kelly in the studio! We discuss drawing curtains and dressing chickens, growing up in Compton, the English teachers of Arkansas, illustrating Ogden Nash with Clip Art, self-insert fan fiction, and poetry: where the sadness goes, imagining into another way of being, leaving out the story, and the idea that “poetry is my securest attachment.” 

Donika Kelly is the author of The Natural Order of Things, The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and Pushcart Prize winner, she has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Donika lives in Iowa City with her wife, the nonfiction writer Melissa Febos, and is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa.