Krystal Languell : part one

Krystal Languell lives in Chicago, where she works for the Poetry Foundation. She is the author of three books: Call the Catastrophists (BlazeVox, 2011), Gray Market (1913 Press, 2016), and Quite Apart (University of Akron Press, forthcoming 2019). She has also published six chapbooks. Since 2010, she has helped coordinate the activities of Belladonna* Collaborative while publishing the feminist poetry journal Bone Bouquet. New and forthcoming work can be found in Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Fence, and elsewhere.

What are you working on?

My third book of poetry is forthcoming in early 2019 from University of Akron Press, and I’m finalizing the manuscript this minute and thinking about cover art. But in terms of writing new stuff, I have a handful of poems in a thus-far short series of sonnets in iambic pentameter after significant pop songs from my childhood. They double as elegies since thus far most of the folks whose work I’m writing after are no longer with us. I can’t mention this without acknowledging the influence of Hanif Abdurraqib’s music writing on me to more directly engage the soundtrack of my life.