“The impossible task of still trying/…”: An Interview with Bianca Stone
Poet and artist Bianca Stone sat down via Zoom to talk to Jane Alberdeston (Binghamton University Creative Writing faculty) about her work in the genres of poetry and poetry comics, her efforts in community development, and her grandmother, the late Ruth Stone. Her poetry collections, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House, 2014), The Mobius Strip Club of Grief (Pleides, 2016), and most recently, What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), have been critically lauded for what a reviewer marked as Stone’s ability to join the concrete and the abstract till there is “… vivid spark” (Connotations Press).
Jane: In your essay, your Ars Poetica, “Why I Make Poetry Comics”, you talked about rejecting any philosophy that limits metamorphosis, your solid understanding of the “…impossible task of still trying/…” , but I wondered, what do you tell people when they struggle with what to call you, if that matters to you? Poet or artist? And did you at some time not know yourself?
Bianca: It’s never really been a struggle for me, I always known that poetry was at the top of disciplines, and, everything is informed by poetry. And it stayed, that’s been that way since I was first making any art or writing. That’s said, I’ve always loved visual art and I felt confident doing it, I felt good doing it. It was always something that was just pleasurable for me. For instance, it wasn’t something I was good at in an academic setting, like in high school and stuff. I didn’t get an A in art class. But I was intuitive. I’m very messy. I am very bad at following instructions. And I didn’t go to art school. I studied poetry and literature in college and in my master’s program. So, I think I’ve talked about this before, but I did feel like I had to choose sides at one point in my life. And certainly, you have to when you’re choosing your area of study, but I was constantly finding ways to bring my visual art into my writing world or my literature classes. And that’s how poetry comics came to be, because I was trying to find a way to draw and paint. It just took off in grad school when I was working with Anne Carson and Matthew Rohr at NYU. And that’s how it started to become more a part of my professional life. People were asking me to collaborate and do book covers and make comics for them. So, I think my interest in comics was always aligned with poetry and I was always looking for how comics informed poetry. I was just very obsessed with it for a while. I’ve stopped doing visual art in the past three years. And I’ve just redoubled my efforts with more writing. You know, these things come and go. But it’s never been a struggle for me to call myself a poet or to have people ask.
Jane: I love how you called it “messy”. That intuitiveness does feel messy. And it leads into the next question. In your poem “The People of Distress” (Someone Else’s Wedding Vows), there’s a line where the speaker promises the future self that what was once drawn would be translated to word. Is there a poem that can’t be a comic or a comic that can’t be a poem? Or is there no boundary?
Bianca: I think the important question within that question is what cannot be said, in language and language is very limiting and fallible. On one hand, and I think a lot of my struggle or any writer’s struggle is to articulate their idea or what’s in their head on the page, finding the right words. Carl Jung did his red book; there’s certain things that happen with imagery, and sort of icons or like symbols that can’t happen, that can’t be articulated necessarily, in words, right? I’ve had times in my life where I felt I couldn’t [articulate] whatever feeling I was having, couldn’t put it into words. And I felt drawn toward visual art to express it. When you can be abstract, you can invoke color. And that has such powerful psychological reflections on the viewer.
And it’s outside of language, right? So, as a creative person, I am trying to figure how not to not feel always beholden to one genre, if what you’re feeling is demanding some other outlet. When I was working with text and image together, I was really interested in what happens to text when it’s next to an image because a lot changes. And that’s why it’s so difficult, because one can ruin the other or take away the experience of the other. When you look at a painting, you get to enjoy the fact that there are no words, and you get to think the words in your head. And when you read a poem, you get to enjoy the fact that there’s no visual aid, like in a storybook, to accompany the text. You get to do all that imaginative work yourself. So, I was just always really interested in the conversation that came up between the two things. And that was just as interesting as doing it, maybe even more interesting.
Jane: I did notice that you could even take the images apart from the words; they live by themselves.
Bianca: Yeah, and I would constantly be taking away and adding different texts. And it was so hard to feel satisfied with the right text and image together. And sometimes I would just end up taking all the text away. Just letting the image sit. But, yeah, I think the best comics are the ones that need both. Great comic artists know this. And they are very good at knowing exactly how much to put in and how much to take away. We can learn a lot about how language works, and how it doesn’t work exploring both image and text.
Jane: You are taking two very volatile genres and putting them together to either say something together or not say something together, which I thought was so powerful.
Bianca: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Like, why? Choosing comics and poetry together goes against narrative in some way, although it’s not that poetry doesn’t have narrative, it’s just that it doesn’t work the same way as prose. In terms of storytelling, there’s so much more taken away in terms of what we see and know. It puts much more emphasis on the relationship between the viewer, a reader and the writer, right? You demand a lot more of the reader to create. And that’s why it doesn’t have as big of a readership. It’s demanding. There’s not enough information here for me to enjoy it. Instead of surrendering to the nobility of it, and then asking yourself, what is here? And why is it here? And what happens when I actually open myself up to the experience of it? Because that’s when strange things start to occur.
Jane: It’s the same battle for poetry, struggling with gleaning new audiences because of that fear. I see it in my students, every time I say, we’re going to talk about a poem, and all their eyes glaze over.
Bianca: Yeah, they’re traumatized from high school poetry.
Jane: And yet, like you said, when they’re little, they love it.
Bianca: And they don’t even call it poetry. My daughter is five. And when she starts babbling, a story or whatever, the narrative that she’s telling me, it’s poetry because it’s very spontaneous and has all these strange associations. I think the problem is that when they learn to read and write, they learn to read and write prose. They learn to read and write to be articulate and give all the information as needed. And it’s very much about the structure of the sentence and things like that. All that goes against what poetry is, right?
I don’t even know how to fix it, except to just examine other possibilities of how we teach children to read and write. Language on the written page could definitely include poetry from the get-go. Okay, well, now we’re gonna be wild and crazy with our words and think about metaphor and abstraction. Right away, not a little unit, in fifth grade.
We’ve talked to some fifth graders, Ben and I, my husband, recently. We asked them “What’s poetry?” they’re like “haiku”. They need some[thing] quantifiable, like beats per line. But in truth, they’ve known what poetry is all along. And, of course, the other thing is, with poetry and art, some kids will gravitate towards it more than others; some kids, that’s not how they communicate, right? So, enforcing that upon them…there’s no point in that. But there are kids who are mind blown, and they just want to do it all the time. I love that.
Jane: It seems your five-year-old was like you when you were younger.
Bianca: I spent so much time with Ruth that it seemed very natural to me to write poetry. It felt familiar to me. I think when you’re good at something you just want to do it more. But also, I think I admired her so much. And it was appealing to me.
Jane: And for her, it was a daily thing. It was part of her daily life, it seemed.
Bianca: Yes, it is that way with certain people and their vocations. It’s daily; it’s an obsession. It’s a definition of who you are, and informs everything that you do, and you’re constantly looking for it and trying to find poems you like. It’s an endless search, trying to write a good poem.
Jane: In your poem, “The Fates”, the speaker highlights the brothers’ perpetual state of grief, lulled only by their need to avenge their parents’ deaths. The speaker surmises that the brothers forget their pain. Are your poems an attempt to forget, to quell memories? And, of course, I always try to separate the poet from the speaker, but there seemed to be a lot of resonance in that poem.
Bianca: I love that question. Because I think it’s really important to what poetry is doing and trying to do and how that mimics psychology and things like grief and trying to wrestle with trauma and whatnot. It’s such an interesting thing, because poetry deals so much with the unconscious, which is forgotten material that we don’t consciously know. And I think, in that way, we write poetry to remember. But also, we write poetry to remember to forget, again, when it comes to trauma. You notice with poets over their lifetime; they will write about the same themes over and over and over again. For some reason, there isn’t a certain catharsis that allows you to move on, although, in terms of traumatic events, usually, there’s certain things you’re just in love with and obsessed with. Ruth is good example, writing about her husband’s death for [her entire] life. And I wonder though, if in writing it, we’re able to get out of it for a moment. Writing it down is not forgetting but being able to know the things that haunt you. It may be a very small specific event within the larger trauma, or like one tiny interaction, that haunts you and you feel this need to write it so that you can move past it. You know it’s not gone forever, but you’re not remembering it in the same haunted way. In some ways, there’s something in the voicing of pain that allows you to transmute it. And forget to repeat it. Maybe.
Jane: There’s a line in the poem “Someone Else’s Wedding Vows”: “Know when you hold me you hold us all.” That line kind of shook me up because it reminded me of your grandmother Ruth’s poetry. I think you’ve already answered this, but in which ways has your grandmother influenced you and your work. And the second part of the question: Has it been difficult, being a poet in her shadow or in her light? And is it fair to line you up against your grandmother’s work?
Bianca: I think it is fair, I was very close with her, and her poetry remains my favorite poetry. I can’t escape it in my head. Her poems are there. I can point to many poems of mine that are in conversation with her poems. And I see that the influence is so powerful; I embrace it, I’ve embraced it as part of who I am as a poet. I feel extremely confident in my own voice in my head, what I’ve done with what I’ve inherited from her, and the good things, which are her incredible way with language and her way of seeing the world and her generous spirit in poetry. Those things are things that I carry in me with honor.
I think what’s hardest for me is that it’s tiring to talk about her. Sometimes, as you know, I get very tired of this sort of same things people say about her and the certain sort of mythologies that are replayed and I that was a lot of what The Mobius Strip Club of Grief was actually about, wrestling with. And, also, it’s hard because there were just so many difficult things about her too. And my own personal experience in my family. That’s more difficult than the poetry — the poetry I feel okay about. And our relationship together, [Ruth and I] was special and sacred and I think healthy. But the larger dynamic of the family with her was not healthy. And so that’s been a big struggle for me. I also started this nonprofit called the Ruth Stone House. And I did that because when she died, she left her estate in trust to be used for the furthering of poetry and the arts. To me and my cousin, and now my brother Walter is doing it, too. We started a 501 C 3, to fulfill her wishes to turn our house into a writing retreat space. It needs a lot of work, and she didn’t leave any money to do anything with it, just the house and the intellectual property. So, since her death, we have been slowly developing our mission and our vision. It’s been really hard to deal with some aspects of the family with that, but we’ve been trying to figure out that this isn’t just about Ruth, right? This is about poetry and the poetry community. That’s what I love the most about honoring her. Her whole way of approaching poetry was very community based: “oh, people come to my house and write poems and stay for a week.” I think she fostered a very nurturing poetry community. And that’s what we want to do.
Jane: You recently received a grant —
Bianca: We’ve been trying this to get this for a while. The biggest hurdle has been the fact that the house needs so much work, and we can’t have people they’re doing retreats and doing events there until we get the house fixed up. That’s why we’ve developed all this other programming outside of the house. We’ve done a lot of work there. And we have a letterpress studio. We have summertime events in the downstairs, while doing the letterpress and having readings on the porch. We do online events, we do online classes, we do things at other locations. But now we got this grant, specifically a grant to put in a heating system. We did raise enough money through individual donations to be able to apply for a matching grant. And we got finally got the matching grant. So, yeah, having a heating system in the house obviously is going to be huge. My grandma’s house in my lifetime has only had a woodstove. This will be a very strange and wondrous thing for me to witness personally. You know, it was hard living up there with just one or two woodstoves and a stove in the kitchen. So yeah, that’s going to be really transformative. That’s happening this year.
Jane: Does that project also feed back to you and your work or is it something separate from your poetry?
Bianca: I mean, my poetry career is… separate from it. For the Ruth Stone House, I do classes. I do fundraising. The classes, of course, always inform my writing life; just engaging with students and putting together fun curriculum, putting together ideas for classes. We have a magazine called Itinerant, I am an editor at large. I do a lot of solicitations of people and just helping. The Ruth Stone House is basically me, my husband, Ben Pease, and my brother Walter Stone. And we have two staff members, Leandra Well, and Candice Jensen. And we are all volunteer based. And we, like a family, have a vision, you know, out of love. So, it’s hard to say that it doesn’t inform my life. I also have this career as a writer that’s separate entirely from the foundation. I’ve made my own name and built my career; because I have done all this work, I can do a lot of ambassadorial kind of work with the RSF. That’s how I can solicit poets to come teach or to be part of the magazine. I have all these connections in the poetry world now that I’ve built up over the past 15 years living in New York City, that I think my poetry life influences the Ruth Stone House.
Jane Alberdeston Coralin currently teaches English at Old Dominion University and was one of the speakers at ODU’s 46th Annual Literary Festival. Her poems have been published in several print and online publications, including Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Paterson Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Caribbean Vistas, among others. She co-authored the novel, Sister Chicas and her new novel, Colony 51, is being released in spring 2023. She is currently working on a collection of stories titled Vivid Gods.
“The impossible task of still trying/…”: An Interview with Bianca Stone
Poet and artist Bianca Stone sat down via Zoom to talk to Jane Alberdeston (Binghamton University Creative Writing faculty) about her work in the genres of poetry and poetry comics, her efforts in community development, and her grandmother, the late Ruth Stone. Her poetry collections, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House, 2014), The Mobius Strip Club of Grief (Pleides, 2016), and most recently, What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), have been critically lauded for what a reviewer marked as Stone’s ability to join the concrete and the abstract till there is “… vivid spark” (Connotations Press).
Jane: In your essay, your Ars Poetica, “Why I Make Poetry Comics”, you talked about rejecting any philosophy that limits metamorphosis, your solid understanding of the “…impossible task of still trying/…” , but I wondered, what do you tell people when they struggle with what to call you, if that matters to you? Poet or artist? And did you at some time not know yourself?
Bianca: It’s never really been a struggle for me, I always known that poetry was at the top of disciplines, and, everything is informed by poetry. And it stayed, that’s been that way since I was first making any art or writing. That’s said, I’ve always loved visual art and I felt confident doing it, I felt good doing it. It was always something that was just pleasurable for me. For instance, it wasn’t something I was good at in an academic setting, like in high school and stuff. I didn’t get an A in art class. But I was intuitive. I’m very messy. I am very bad at following instructions. And I didn’t go to art school. I studied poetry and literature in college and in my master’s program. So, I think I’ve talked about this before, but I did feel like I had to choose sides at one point in my life. And certainly, you have to when you’re choosing your area of study, but I was constantly finding ways to bring my visual art into my writing world or my literature classes. And that’s how poetry comics came to be, because I was trying to find a way to draw and paint. It just took off in grad school when I was working with Anne Carson and Matthew Rohr at NYU. And that’s how it started to become more a part of my professional life. People were asking me to collaborate and do book covers and make comics for them. So, I think my interest in comics was always aligned with poetry and I was always looking for how comics informed poetry. I was just very obsessed with it for a while. I’ve stopped doing visual art in the past three years. And I’ve just redoubled my efforts with more writing. You know, these things come and go. But it’s never been a struggle for me to call myself a poet or to have people ask.
Jane: I love how you called it “messy”. That intuitiveness does feel messy. And it leads into the next question. In your poem “The People of Distress” (Someone Else’s Wedding Vows), there’s a line where the speaker promises the future self that what was once drawn would be translated to word. Is there a poem that can’t be a comic or a comic that can’t be a poem? Or is there no boundary?
Bianca: I think the important question within that question is what cannot be said, in language and language is very limiting and fallible. On one hand, and I think a lot of my struggle or any writer’s struggle is to articulate their idea or what’s in their head on the page, finding the right words. Carl Jung did his red book; there’s certain things that happen with imagery, and sort of icons or like symbols that can’t happen, that can’t be articulated necessarily, in words, right? I’ve had times in my life where I felt I couldn’t [articulate] whatever feeling I was having, couldn’t put it into words. And I felt drawn toward visual art to express it. When you can be abstract, you can invoke color. And that has such powerful psychological reflections on the viewer.
And it’s outside of language, right? So, as a creative person, I am trying to figure how not to not feel always beholden to one genre, if what you’re feeling is demanding some other outlet. When I was working with text and image together, I was really interested in what happens to text when it’s next to an image because a lot changes. And that’s why it’s so difficult, because one can ruin the other or take away the experience of the other. When you look at a painting, you get to enjoy the fact that there are no words, and you get to think the words in your head. And when you read a poem, you get to enjoy the fact that there’s no visual aid, like in a storybook, to accompany the text. You get to do all that imaginative work yourself. So, I was just always really interested in the conversation that came up between the two things. And that was just as interesting as doing it, maybe even more interesting.
Jane: I did notice that you could even take the images apart from the words; they live by themselves.
Bianca: Yeah, and I would constantly be taking away and adding different texts. And it was so hard to feel satisfied with the right text and image together. And sometimes I would just end up taking all the text away. Just letting the image sit. But, yeah, I think the best comics are the ones that need both. Great comic artists know this. And they are very good at knowing exactly how much to put in and how much to take away. We can learn a lot about how language works, and how it doesn’t work exploring both image and text.
Jane: You are taking two very volatile genres and putting them together to either say something together or not say something together, which I thought was so powerful.
Bianca: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Like, why? Choosing comics and poetry together goes against narrative in some way, although it’s not that poetry doesn’t have narrative, it’s just that it doesn’t work the same way as prose. In terms of storytelling, there’s so much more taken away in terms of what we see and know. It puts much more emphasis on the relationship between the viewer, a reader and the writer, right? You demand a lot more of the reader to create. And that’s why it doesn’t have as big of a readership. It’s demanding. There’s not enough information here for me to enjoy it. Instead of surrendering to the nobility of it, and then asking yourself, what is here? And why is it here? And what happens when I actually open myself up to the experience of it? Because that’s when strange things start to occur.
Jane: It’s the same battle for poetry, struggling with gleaning new audiences because of that fear. I see it in my students, every time I say, we’re going to talk about a poem, and all their eyes glaze over.
Bianca: Yeah, they’re traumatized from high school poetry.
Jane: And yet, like you said, when they’re little, they love it.
Bianca: And they don’t even call it poetry. My daughter is five. And when she starts babbling, a story or whatever, the narrative that she’s telling me, it’s poetry because it’s very spontaneous and has all these strange associations. I think the problem is that when they learn to read and write, they learn to read and write prose. They learn to read and write to be articulate and give all the information as needed. And it’s very much about the structure of the sentence and things like that. All that goes against what poetry is, right?
I don’t even know how to fix it, except to just examine other possibilities of how we teach children to read and write. Language on the written page could definitely include poetry from the get-go. Okay, well, now we’re gonna be wild and crazy with our words and think about metaphor and abstraction. Right away, not a little unit, in fifth grade.
We’ve talked to some fifth graders, Ben and I, my husband, recently. We asked them “What’s poetry?” they’re like “haiku”. They need some[thing] quantifiable, like beats per line. But in truth, they’ve known what poetry is all along. And, of course, the other thing is, with poetry and art, some kids will gravitate towards it more than others; some kids, that’s not how they communicate, right? So, enforcing that upon them…there’s no point in that. But there are kids who are mind blown, and they just want to do it all the time. I love that.
Jane: It seems your five-year-old was like you when you were younger.
Bianca: I spent so much time with Ruth that it seemed very natural to me to write poetry. It felt familiar to me. I think when you’re good at something you just want to do it more. But also, I think I admired her so much. And it was appealing to me.
Jane: And for her, it was a daily thing. It was part of her daily life, it seemed.
Bianca: Yes, it is that way with certain people and their vocations. It’s daily; it’s an obsession. It’s a definition of who you are, and informs everything that you do, and you’re constantly looking for it and trying to find poems you like. It’s an endless search, trying to write a good poem.
Jane: In your poem, “The Fates”, the speaker highlights the brothers’ perpetual state of grief, lulled only by their need to avenge their parents’ deaths. The speaker surmises that the brothers forget their pain. Are your poems an attempt to forget, to quell memories? And, of course, I always try to separate the poet from the speaker, but there seemed to be a lot of resonance in that poem.
Bianca: I love that question. Because I think it’s really important to what poetry is doing and trying to do and how that mimics psychology and things like grief and trying to wrestle with trauma and whatnot. It’s such an interesting thing, because poetry deals so much with the unconscious, which is forgotten material that we don’t consciously know. And I think, in that way, we write poetry to remember. But also, we write poetry to remember to forget, again, when it comes to trauma. You notice with poets over their lifetime; they will write about the same themes over and over and over again. For some reason, there isn’t a certain catharsis that allows you to move on, although, in terms of traumatic events, usually, there’s certain things you’re just in love with and obsessed with. Ruth is good example, writing about her husband’s death for [her entire] life. And I wonder though, if in writing it, we’re able to get out of it for a moment. Writing it down is not forgetting but being able to know the things that haunt you. It may be a very small specific event within the larger trauma, or like one tiny interaction, that haunts you and you feel this need to write it so that you can move past it. You know it’s not gone forever, but you’re not remembering it in the same haunted way. In some ways, there’s something in the voicing of pain that allows you to transmute it. And forget to repeat it. Maybe.
Jane: There’s a line in the poem “Someone Else’s Wedding Vows”: “Know when you hold me you hold us all.” That line kind of shook me up because it reminded me of your grandmother Ruth’s poetry. I think you’ve already answered this, but in which ways has your grandmother influenced you and your work. And the second part of the question: Has it been difficult, being a poet in her shadow or in her light? And is it fair to line you up against your grandmother’s work?
Bianca: I think it is fair, I was very close with her, and her poetry remains my favorite poetry. I can’t escape it in my head. Her poems are there. I can point to many poems of mine that are in conversation with her poems. And I see that the influence is so powerful; I embrace it, I’ve embraced it as part of who I am as a poet. I feel extremely confident in my own voice in my head, what I’ve done with what I’ve inherited from her, and the good things, which are her incredible way with language and her way of seeing the world and her generous spirit in poetry. Those things are things that I carry in me with honor.
I think what’s hardest for me is that it’s tiring to talk about her. Sometimes, as you know, I get very tired of this sort of same things people say about her and the certain sort of mythologies that are replayed and I that was a lot of what The Mobius Strip Club of Grief was actually about, wrestling with. And, also, it’s hard because there were just so many difficult things about her too. And my own personal experience in my family. That’s more difficult than the poetry — the poetry I feel okay about. And our relationship together, [Ruth and I] was special and sacred and I think healthy. But the larger dynamic of the family with her was not healthy. And so that’s been a big struggle for me. I also started this nonprofit called the Ruth Stone House. And I did that because when she died, she left her estate in trust to be used for the furthering of poetry and the arts. To me and my cousin, and now my brother Walter is doing it, too. We started a 501 C 3, to fulfill her wishes to turn our house into a writing retreat space. It needs a lot of work, and she didn’t leave any money to do anything with it, just the house and the intellectual property. So, since her death, we have been slowly developing our mission and our vision. It’s been really hard to deal with some aspects of the family with that, but we’ve been trying to figure out that this isn’t just about Ruth, right? This is about poetry and the poetry community. That’s what I love the most about honoring her. Her whole way of approaching poetry was very community based: “oh, people come to my house and write poems and stay for a week.” I think she fostered a very nurturing poetry community. And that’s what we want to do.
Jane: You recently received a grant —
Bianca: We’ve been trying this to get this for a while. The biggest hurdle has been the fact that the house needs so much work, and we can’t have people they’re doing retreats and doing events there until we get the house fixed up. That’s why we’ve developed all this other programming outside of the house. We’ve done a lot of work there. And we have a letterpress studio. We have summertime events in the downstairs, while doing the letterpress and having readings on the porch. We do online events, we do online classes, we do things at other locations. But now we got this grant, specifically a grant to put in a heating system. We did raise enough money through individual donations to be able to apply for a matching grant. And we got finally got the matching grant. So, yeah, having a heating system in the house obviously is going to be huge. My grandma’s house in my lifetime has only had a woodstove. This will be a very strange and wondrous thing for me to witness personally. You know, it was hard living up there with just one or two woodstoves and a stove in the kitchen. So yeah, that’s going to be really transformative. That’s happening this year.
Jane: Does that project also feed back to you and your work or is it something separate from your poetry?
Bianca: I mean, my poetry career is… separate from it. For the Ruth Stone House, I do classes. I do fundraising. The classes, of course, always inform my writing life; just engaging with students and putting together fun curriculum, putting together ideas for classes. We have a magazine called Itinerant, I am an editor at large. I do a lot of solicitations of people and just helping. The Ruth Stone House is basically me, my husband, Ben Pease, and my brother Walter Stone. And we have two staff members, Leandra Well, and Candice Jensen. And we are all volunteer based. And we, like a family, have a vision, you know, out of love. So, it’s hard to say that it doesn’t inform my life. I also have this career as a writer that’s separate entirely from the foundation. I’ve made my own name and built my career; because I have done all this work, I can do a lot of ambassadorial kind of work with the RSF. That’s how I can solicit poets to come teach or to be part of the magazine. I have all these connections in the poetry world now that I’ve built up over the past 15 years living in New York City, that I think my poetry life influences the Ruth Stone House.
Jane Alberdeston Coralin currently teaches English at Old Dominion University and was one of the speakers at ODU’s 46th Annual Literary Festival. Her poems have been published in several print and online publications, including Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Paterson Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Caribbean Vistas, among others. She co-authored the novel, Sister Chicas and her new novel, Colony 51, is being released in spring 2023. She is currently working on a collection of stories titled Vivid Gods.