Jessica Mehta : part five

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

Li-Young Lee, particularly his poem “Braiding.” It’s a reminder to love the current moment: “There will come a day / one of us will have to imagine this.”

Jessica Mehta : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately? 

I’m on a self-prescribed diet of “research-only” books, but fortunately most of them are poetry. I’m neck-deep in the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Marianne Moore, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath.

Jessica Mehta : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t? 

Poetry demands a trimming of the fat, and the ability to say critical things concisely. For me, there is a protective veil in poetry that allows me to be totally honest and forthcoming in a way other genres don’t.
  

Jessica Mehta : part two

How does your work first enter the world? 

Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with? I’ve never been part of a writers group. I simply wrote, mostly poetry, for years. When I was in my 30s, I took a chance and sent an unsolicited manuscript to a publisher. It was accepted the same month.

Jessica Mehta : part one

Jessica Mehta is a multi-award-winning poet and author of over one dozen books. She’s currently a poetry editor at Bending Genres Literary Review, Airlie Press, and the peer-reviewed Exclamat!on journal. During 2018-19, she was a fellow at Halcyon Arts Lab in Washington DC where she curated an anthology of poetry by incarcerated indigenous women and created “Red/Act,” a pop-up virtual reality poetry experience using proprietary software. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and native Oregonian, place and personal ancestry inform much of Jessica’s creative work.

Jessica’s novel The Wrong Kind of Indian won gold at the 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs). Jessica has also received numerous visiting fellowships in recent years, including the Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship at the Lilly Library at Indiana University at Bloomington and the Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship at The British Library. Visual representations of her work have been featured at galleries and exhibitions around the world including IA&A Hillyer in Washington DC and The Emergency Gallery in Sweden. Jessica is a popular speaker and panelist, featured recently at events like the US State Department’s National Poetry Month event, “Poets as Cultural Emissaries: A Conversation with Women Writers,” as well as the “Women’s Transatlantic Prison Activism Since 1960” symposium at Oxford University.” Visit www.jessicamehta.com to learn more.

What are you working on?

I have four books releasing in 2019, one in 2020, and am currently completing the seventh month of a nine-month fellowship at Halcyon Arts Lab in Washington DC where I’m curating an anthology by incarcerated indigenous women. I also just finished up a manuscript and am working on my PhD in poetry.