Mouthy is an intimate poetry collection in which you write from the layered experience of being Black, queer, femme, soft, and often misread. What was the biggest challenge you faced in putting together this poetry collection?

The biggest challenge was allowing the collection to be honest without over-explaining itself. So much of MOUTHY comes from the experience of being misread before I even open my mouth. Blackness gets misread. Femmeness gets misread. Softness gets misread. Queerness gets misread. I had to resist the urge to defend every part of myself on the page.

I wanted the poems to have teeth, humor, tenderness, and grief, but I did not want the book to feel like I was begging to be understood. The challenge was learning to trust my voice enough to let it stand. Some poems are loud. Some are wounded. Some are funny because laughter has always been part of how I survived. The work was bringing all of those selves into one room and letting them speak without apologizing.

Softness appears repeatedly as a source of strength rather than fragility. What drew you to that idea?

I think I was drawn to softness because I spent so much of my life watching people treat it like a weakness. Growing up Black, queer, femme, and Southern, softness often felt like something I was supposed to hide or harden into something more acceptable. But the older I get, the more I understand that softness is not the absence of strength. Sometimes softness is the thing that keeps you human.

For me, softness is the ability to still love, still feel, still create, still laugh, and still reach for beauty after the world has tried to make you smaller. That is not fragile to me. That is powerful. MOUTHY is very much a collection about reclaiming the parts of myself I was taught to shrink.

The prose piece about returning to your small town is especially restrained and reflective. What was it like to write about a place that shaped you so deeply?

Writing about my small town required a lot of care. I did not want to write it as a villain, because the truth is more complicated than that. The place that hurt you can also be the place that made you funny, observant, stylish, spiritual, careful, and strong. Erin, Tennessee shaped my ear, my humor, my fear, my longing, and my understanding of silence.

That piece had to be restrained because returning to a place like that is not always dramatic on the outside. Sometimes the drama is internal. It is in what your body remembers. It is in the roads, the churches, the family names, the rooms where nobody said what everyone knew. Writing it meant honoring the child I was there while also recognizing the adult who survived long enough to look back.

What do you hope readers who may not share your experiences nevertheless understand after reading the collection?

I hope readers understand that being seen is not a small thing. For people who live at the intersections of race, queerness, gender expression, body, class, and place, being misunderstood can become a daily weather. It shapes how you move, how you speak, how you love, and how safe you feel taking up space.

But I also hope they understand that MOUTHY is not only about pain. It is about voice. It is about humor. It is about beauty. It is about refusing to disappear. Even if a reader has not lived my exact experience, I hope they recognize the human desire underneath it: the need to be loved without translation, without apology, and without having to become smaller first.

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