Amanda Johnston - ANOTHER WAY TO SAY ENTER

Amanda Johnston will be reading with Jonathan Moody

In Amanda Johnston's debut collection, Another Way to Say Enter, readers are offered glimpses of scenes as if peering through windows and doors. Bright and sharp, precise in their Imagism, Johnston's poems distill moments to their essence, challenge notions of what it means to fully examine a life day by day, room by room. These poems are both visceral and spiritual, reminding the reader that entry, departure, and the inevitable return is a journey that must be felt, not just imagined.

Amanda Johnston earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter (Argus House Press). Her poetry and interviews have appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them, Callaloo, Poetry, Kinfolks Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, Pluck!, No, Dear and the anthologies, Small Batch, Full, di-ver-city, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. The recipient of multiple Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Christina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival, she is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. Johnston is a Stonecoast MFA faculty member, a cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founding executive director of Torch Literary Arts. She serves on the Cave Canem Foundation board of directors and currently lives in Texas.

Jonathan Moody received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and his BS in Psychology from Xavier University in Louisiana. He is a Cave Canem graduate fellow whose poetry has appeared in African American Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Common, Crab Orchard Review, good foot, Tidal Basin Review, Xavier Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and the anthology Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, among other publications. He is the author of Olympic Butter Gold and The Doomy Poems. Moody teaches at Pearland High School and lives in Fresno, Texas, with his wife and son.