Each month, we feature one Texas author in conversation with another. We offer a vast array of storytellers who represent the spirit of the Lone Star State and continue to keep us on the literary map. In the past, we’ve featured novelists such as Kathleen Kent, Marisol Cortez, Joe Lansdale, and Antonio Ruiz-Camacho and Texas poet laureates such as Carmen Tafolla, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Jenny Brown, and Emmy Pérez.
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Join us on Wednesday, March 19th, 2025 via Zoom for a conversation with Melissa Studdard, to discuss her new book, Dear Selection Committee (Jackleg Press).
(Virtual Readings Monthly @ 7pm CST)
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Sign up for Melissa Studdard’s class, The Poetics of You: An Intro to Poetry Workshop on Monday, April 7th!
“I buried // everything they told me to bury. Then, I dug it up again,” Melissa Studdard writes in Dear Selection Committee, an apt description of the work these poems do to unearth the incorrigible self and bury conventionality and its offspring, shame. The speaker revels in her largesse, claiming, in one poem’s title, she’s “Huge Like King Kong, Like Godzilla, Like Gulliver,” and that the “world is my diorama of a world,” and in another, that her honeymoon pictures are “the cover / of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.” All of this immensity, this grand unburying, is squeezed into the prosaic corseting structure of a job application, intensifying the split between tame and wild. Even her own birth is enacted with kinetic magnificence: “I broke the kingdom inside her, broke the gala / of horses straining to get out. I broke the dancehall // mirrors and even the gilded faucet handles. / I was a river that strong. Made for flooding.” Indeed, these poems are so desirous and animated that they spilled over the edges of the page and into my thirsty soul. “-Diane Seuss
“The poems in Dear Selection Committee say what I’ve always wanted to say in a job application (and what I’m thinking as I perform the role of Normal Job Person) but never had the guts. Melissa Studdard’s burn-it-down-radical honesty is elating af—exactly what I needed to read—but the poetic attentiveness, from the first page to the last, was the real thrill. At the heart of the cyclone, a dependable, deepening pulse of self preservation.” -Jennifer L. Knox
“In the universe of Melissa Studdard’s poems, both the speaker and the audience will always have their cake and eat it too. After all, “Life’s never dull when your name’s Melissa,” and oh my goddess, does Dear Selection Committee serve hard as a brilliant 21st-century take and critique of the epistolary, filled with infinite heart and infinite humor and infinite neon signs that point towards the larger-than-life nature of poetry. This is excess. This is extravagance. This is the definition of sensuality. Studdard has the tremendous gift of finding the center of every poem, giving us the whole damn thing.” -Dorothy Chan
Framed as a job application and bounding with associative leaps and surrealist underpinnings, Dear Selection Committee is a subversive, sexy love song to an endlessly messy self and the burning world it inhabits. Full of apostrophic power, these poems shift among registers of loss, desire, and joy as they wrestle with issues such as climate change, addiction, modern distractions, gender presentation, religious questioning, and the nature of pain. Dear Selection Committee attests that although life can feel like a bumpy cab ride to an interview for a job you feel uniquely unqualified for, if you lay aside the anxieties of self just long enough to peer out the window, you’ll see great beauty amidst the chaos.
Melissa Studdard is the author of five books, including the poetry collection I ATE THE COSMOS FOR BREAKFAST. Her work has been published or featured by places such as NPR, PBS, The New York Times, The Guardian, POETRY, Kenyon Review, Psychology Today, and New England Review. Her awards include The Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the REEL Poetry Festival Audience Choice Award, the Tom Howard Prize, and more.
Moderator
A Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry recipient, Elena Karina Byrne served as a final judge for PEN’s “Best of the West” award, for the 2016-2018 Kate and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards, and for the international Laurel Prize in environmental poetry. Her five poetry collections include If This Makes You Nervous (Omnidawn, 2021). Poems, reviews, essays, and interviews can be found in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, APR, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, LA Review of Books, Plume anthologies, Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies, BOMB, and elsewhere. Former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena now works as a freelance editor, lecturer, reviewer, and Programming Consultant & Poetry Stage Manager for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
UPCOMING 2025 AUTHORS AND TITLES
Feb 19, Octavio Quintanilla
March 19, Melissa Studdard
PREVIOUS AUTHORS AND TITLES
Octavio Quintanilla, The Impossible Hours
Kimberly Garza, The Last Karankawas
Carmen Calatayud, This Tangled Body
Anel Flores, Cortinas de lluvia/Curtains of Rain
Joshua Robbins, Eschatology in Crayon Wax
Ayokunle Falomo, Autobiomythography of
Sasha West, How to Abandon Ship
Ramona Reeves, It Falls Gently All Around
Alex Temblador, Writing an Identity Not Your Own: A Guide for Creative Writers
Glenn Blake, The Old and the Lost: Collected Stories
Cyrus Cassells, Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?
Jason Stone, The Beauty of the Days Gone By
Mag Gabbert, Sex Depression Animals
Rudy Ruiz, Valley of Shadows
Carmen Tafolla, Warrior Girl
Katie Gutierrez, More Than You’ll Ever Know
Thomas H. McNeely, Pictures of the Shark
Rubén Degollado, The Family Izquierdo
Jehanne Dubrow, Taste: A Book of Small Bites
Richard Z. Santos, Trust Me
Andrew Porter, The Disappeared
Steve Adams, Remember This
Leticia Urieta, Las Criaturas
Vincent Cooper, Zarzamora
Allison Hedge Coke, Look At This Blue
Tomás Q. Morín, Let Me Count the Ways
Daniel Peña, Bang
Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau: A Novel
Carmen Tafolla and illustrator Regina Moya, The Last Butterfly
Laurie Ann Guerrero, I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake
Alexandra van de Kamp, Ricochet Script
Wondra Chang, Sonju
Johnnie Bernhard, Sisters of the Undertow
Barbara Ras, The Blues of Heaven
Mike Soto, A Grave is Given Supper
Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8
Marisol Cortez, Luz At Midnight
Sergio Troncoso, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son
Edward Vidaurre, Pandemia & Other Poems
Octavio Quintanilla, If I Go Missing
Sherry Kafka Wagner, Hannah Jackson
Nan Cuba, Body and Bread
Cliff Hudder, Pretty Enough for You
Rebekah Manley, Alexandra and the Awful, Awkward, No Fun, Truly Bad Dates A Picture Book Parody for Adults
Jenny Browne, Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems (TCU Poet Laureate Series)
Amanda Eyre Ward, The Jetsetters
Heather Harper Ellett, Ain’t Nobody Nobody.
Andrea Vocab Sanderson, She Lives in Music
Antonio Ruiz-Camacho: Barefoot Dogs
Wendy Barker: Gloss
Fowzia Karimi: Above Us the Milky Way
Joe R. Lansdale: Edge of Dark Water
Kendra Allen: When You Learn the Alphabet
Emmy Pérez: With The River on Our Face
Kathleen Kent: The Dime & The Burn
David Samuel Levinson: Tell Me How This Ends Well