Stella Hayes : part one

Russian-American poet Stella Hayes is the author of poetry collection One Strange Country (What Books Press, forthcoming in 2020). She grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Prelude, The Indianapolis Review and Spillway, among others.

Photo credit: Karin Charbit-Harnevo

What are you working on?

I am excited to have just returned to my publisher the last round of proofs of One Strange Country, my debut poetry collection forthcoming in October. I am also placing my second book Nowhere with Him.

Before the pandemic, I was working on Propaganda, my third poetry book. I had 25 poems. In it I am investigating how erotic, familial and parental love is founded on an accepted set of illusions/delusions. Night is a leitmotif and how I prefer it to day. I find myself going to bed at nearly dawn and so what I do at night continues to be a theme. At the moment, everything is up in the air and I am—be it unwillingly— find myself writing pandemic poems. I am hoping to weave them into the book, abandon the book altogether, and/or write a cycle of “Pandemic Chronicles.”