.Interview with Editor-in-Residence Erica Dawson Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This fall we're honored to have Erica Dawson join us as a poetry editor-in-residence while Rebecca Lindenberg takes a well-deserved sabbatical! I met Erica back in 2009 when I was a new student in the PhD program here at the University of Cincinnati and she was in her final year. We talked about reading Renaissance-era poets, and I was floored by her reading at the event celebrating grads. It's been great to see her additional successes since then, and to publish an excerpt of her book-length poem, When Rap Spoke Straight to God (Tin House, 2018) in our Issue 15.1. Erica will be curating the spring issue (22.1) with Assistant Editor Andy Sia. The two of them will read poetry submissions this fall (so, those remaining from previous submission periods as well as September submissions) and participate in a virtual public reading/launch and lecture on editing in the spring near the issue's release. We're grateful to the Ohio Arts Council for their support of this editor-in-residence program through the ArtsRise grant. We hope to offer this position—which supports a mid-career writer with experience in literary publishing and numerous publications of merit—in the future as funding and staffing allow. To kick off her time with us, I asked Erica a few questions: I've long been fascinated by how you bring contemporary diction and concerns into verse forms, since I read Big-Eyed Afraid and then The Small Blades Hurt. Your third book, When Rap Spoke Straight to God, is expansive and oracular, with those kinds of forms nestled in it. How does writing in form affect the poem that gets written, and how do you revise within those structures? For me, received forms are extremely generative. Forms like the sonnet or villanelle may look restrictive, but so many possibilities open up when I find a poem taking a particular shape. My brain starts searching for even more patterns to play with, ways to wind the syntax around line breaks, which have to meet certain marks in terms of rhythm, repetition, or rhyme. An energy grows within the structure and I love the way that energy can bump up against our expectations of whatever form I'm using. Maybe I just like rules—following them, breaking them, rewriting them, making my own. Revising, though, is really hard. Changing a verb's tense can mess with the meter. Choosing a different rhyme can force me to start the whole thing all over again. I'm okay with that. I love the often lengthy and always tumultuous process of letting a poem become what it wants to be, not what I intended it to be when I started out. Whether it's in the strictest of forms or a freer shape, it's a living, breathing thing if I've done my job well. As our Editor-in-Residence, what editorial experience do you bring to the table, and what do you look forward to about the position? I was poetry editor at Tampa Review for five years
