A Conversation with Poet Laura Read
By: Johanna Deletti & Madison Bourguignon
LAURA Read’s third poetry collection, But She Is Also Jane (Winner of the Juniper Prize from University of Massachusetts Press), was released in April 2023, delivering a sharp commentary on misogyny, shame, and many other facets of the female experience. In the context of our current political climate, the collection remains funny, disarming, and painfully relevant. Read is playful with her use of narrative forms, tackling socio-political themes while also delving into shadowed layers of the past.
Read’s ekphrastic poem, “In the Same Way We Misunderstand the Child Ballerinas of Degas,” engages the art of French Impressionist Artist Edgar Degas, along with a range of issues, from anti-Semitism to
innocence lost. In another poem, Read reflects on Monica Lewinsky, mistakes, and double standards. The collection’s opening piece, “RIP, Laura’s Vagina,” is a satirical non-eulogy for what a doctor calls the
speaker’s “devitalizing” body part—which the speaker insists, through hilarious subplot, “still works.”
On March 7, 2025, just before we initiated this interview, Laura Read’s “Love Poem with Staples” was featured on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. Her poem is embroidered with threads of grief, vulnerability, and womanhood. It felt, somehow to us, prescient: at the time of this writing, we are on the cusp of spring in Seattle, eagerly waiting as the days grow longer and brighter. As sunlight begins peeking shyly through Washington’s overcast, that hopeful feeling in the air is reflected amid the poem’s loss, where it “fills up / the room and makes us feel / like things will be all right” (51-53).
The study of language and poetics is a vast and ongoing one. As passionate students of literature, we found ourselves particularly inspired by the feminist commentary present within Read’s works and wanted
to engage further on her ideas—which we did, as a final project in our Poetry and Poetics course with Professor Maya Jewell Zeller. Read graciously agreed to answer some of our questions over email, resulting in a conversation on the exploration of time and memory, grief, healing, the fulfillment found in community, and the role reclaiming plays in creating feminist art. Read shares further insight on current and upcoming projects, where she finds inspiration, and the events that have shaped her as a person and an artist.
Laura Read’s next poetry collection, The Serious World, will be out in
October 2025 from BOA Editions.
This interview was conducted over email, by Johanna Deletti and Madison Bourguignon, as a final project for Professor Maya Jewell Zeller’s Poetry and Poetics Course, March 2025.
Johanna Deletti is a copywriter, hospitality professional, and ESL instructor from Boston, Massachusetts. She is in her senior year at CWU, completing her BA in English with a focus on Professional and Creative Writing. Her inspiration for poetry is derived from her love for the Spanish and Italian languages, alongside an effort to explore justice through the art of poetry. She has served as the Lion Rock Visiting
Writers Series Literary Intern from Fall 2024 through Spring 2025. Her work has appeared in The Unsealed, a motivational poetic platform that aims to heal and inspire, in a collection of self-reflective letters and
empowering poetry.
Madison Bourguignon is a former professional tennis player who recently moved back to the Pacific Northwest, after over a decade of living in South Florida. She is a transfer student at CWU, majoring in
English and Professional and Creative Writing. In addition to being a dedicated reader of literature, she is an avid consumer of The Paris Review’s interview columns; she holds a particular interest in exploring
artistic identities beyond the artists’ published works.
JD & MB: You are extremely active in local arts programming in your
community, as an educator, Spokane’s former poet laureate, and a creator yourself. Your active interest in literary events alongside poets such as Ada Limón, Gabrielle Bates, and Maya Jewell Zeller is truly admirable. What does partaking in this community mean to you as an artist? How does it impact the way you approach your work?
LR: I am very active in my community, or at least I try to be. Iteach full-time at Spokane Falls Community College and part-time in Eastern Washington University’s MFA program, so I’m very busy with my jobs, but my jobs are connected to the literary community of Spokane as well, so I attend readings, teach at community workshops, etc. My job at EWU is one I choose to do on top of my full-time job because it is so rewarding, and I think my work there best illustrates how community impacts my creative work. I enjoy working with all of my students, but my connections to my graduate students and their work are perhaps the most fulfilling because I get to help them as they write and defend their thesis. This past weekend, I spent an afternoon with one of my thesis advisees from last year, Keely, and two other students in the program. We went to Keely’s farm and workshopped poems, not because we had to, but because we wanted to. Because we’ve formed such a special community that this is what we want to do on a Saturday
afternoon. Last night I was revising a poem I’d shared with them, and I emailed one of the poets, Liz, who had an idea for the last line, to see if I’d gotten it right. My work is often inspired by the books we read
together, the poems we write together, and the relationships we form.
JD & MB: But She Is Also Jane is your third full-length published collection. What aspect of beginning new projects most excites you, and what do you find most challenging?
LR: I love new projects! I feel sad when I don’t have one. But She Is Also Jane wasn’t originally the book it became; it started out as poems that addressed aging and the different selves we collect over the course of a life. It was originally called Aurelia, which is a reference to the moon jellyfish in the poem, “Jellyfish,” and the line “Everything has another name.” (See my interest in doubles that I addressed in the
question about the Janes!). But then I realized I had several poems in the book that were overtly feminist and political, and I decided to lean into that a little more. When I arrive at a title or concept, this gives me
more ideas for new poems I could write, and the book takes off from there. My new book, The Serious World, which will be out in October, started out as a chapbook of poems, written to Sylvia Plath, about mental health and illness during the pandemic. It changed though when I took some classes on Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir and added them to the book. What I find the most challenging is finding a starting point. I never mind when that starting point evolves into something else, but sometimes it does take a while to get a new project going. The manuscript I’m working on right now had a weird beginning. I started by writing poems about Terwiliger Plaza, a retirement home in Portland where my parents are living, as a way to write about aging and change and losing my parents, but then I started writing about the television show Call the Midwife because I watch that show with my mom when I go stay with her at Terwilliger, and now the book has several poems about the tv show, and its working title, The Mother House, is a reference to the show as well. So that took me in a new direction, and it will probably keep changing since I’m very early in the process. I’m also writing about photographs and photography, so that may be a braid in the collection, and that is helping me generate new poems as well.
JD & MB: In your 2023 interview with The Inlander, you spoke on the roles time and memory play in your creative process—can you talk more about that? What is the recollection of memories like for you, in the writing process?
LR: Losing my dad as a young child forever shaped who I became, as a person and as an artist. I am always trying to get back to the time when he was alive. Poems help me do this. They help me picture
the bedroom I slept in then. And that sometimes gives me a glimpse of something I hadn’t remembered about that house, that time, my dad, who I was then. I find it both sad and healing. And also surprising. I
like the ways different memories from different times can be stitched together in a poem to help me reach new realizations.
JD & MB: This collection’s epigraph comes from Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar: “My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.” In a 2017 interview with Spokane Public Radio, you read two poems referred to as “self-portraits” — do you consider the heroines in this collection, of which there are numerous, to be versions of yourself, or “self-portraits”?
LR: I think I answered this one in the question about the title, but I love that you referred to the epigraph. 🙂
JD & MB: Inspired by the line, “I had designed myself to be feminine” (Read 25), what are your thoughts on female stereotypes, and how does this play a role in your writing? Is “The Cheerleader” a reclaiming? Do you believe in reclaiming?
LR: Yes, I think “The Cheerleader” is a reclaiming, and I definitely believe in reclaiming. I think “RIP, Laura’s Vagina” reclaims as well. And “Phallogocentric.” And “Jane Doe 1-9.” Reclaiming is one of the things that makes me want to write. If something makes me angry, I want to talk back to it, but because I’ve been so conditioned by my gender role, I very rarely do, in real life as they say, so I need poems! I think the time period in which I grew up was a very gendered time, and this time period we’re living in now less so, so my age has influenced my interest in female stereotypes because I felt so limited by and hurt by them.
JD & MB: There is a rebellious, empowering feminism in this collection; Keetje Kuipers said it “called up such a horrible sense of recognition as a woman.” Comparatively, what role do you envision for men who might read your book?
LR: Maybe they will find it educational. I think it’s always good to read about and imagine experiences outside our own because it can make us more compassionate.
JD & MB: “In a discussion of beauty, let us not forget ugliness” (Read 18). Will you talk about your admiration for France? What is it about Edgar Degas’ French impressionistic paintings that sparked your interest to reveal its layered meanings toward misogyny and the greater cultural understanding of women’s roles in society?
LR: I went to France for my junior year of college and, especially because I have very rarely left home for an extended period of time, this year made a big difference in my life. I love the French language and
French art, and I find that my interest in and my memories of France come into my poems frequently. What specifically interested me about Degas is how different his biography is from his paintings. I think I
read an article about him and then saw how little I’d understood him just from viewing his paintings and sculptures. This relates to your question about “The Music Box” as well, the question the speaker poses, “Is everything good also bad?” I guess I think it is, and that’s fascinating.
JD & MB: Regarding the two-part format of But She Is Also Jane, did you compose the series to address girlhood and womanhood, or some other thematic element? And how do you hope this collection’s progression connects the reader and audience with its speakers?
LR: I think I was thinking of the poems in the first section as being more about childhood and the ones in the second section as being more about the speaker’s later years.
JD & MB: The titular line from this collection – “Jane is pulling her /But she is also Jane” – carries a central theme. Is there a part of you as a woman and an artist that sees pieces of yourself in the women around you? Do you view the female experience as a shared experience?
LR: I am always writing poems about other girls and women in whom I see versions of myself. They’re often even just titled by the respective girl’s or woman’s name, for example, “Erin,” in this collection. I am working on a new book tentatively called The Mother House, and I noticed that I’ve already done two poems titled with women’s names. I’m also very interested in doubles, which I reference in my forthcoming collection, The Serious World, and in the book I’m working on now. So yes, I do see pieces of myself in other people who identify female, and yes, I do see the female experience as a shared one. Of course, everyone’s experiences are different, but there are some experiences that are particular to people who identify as female, in my opinion. Also, I think this may be becoming less true than it was when I was coming of age in the 70s and 80s as we are rethinking gender in big ways right now, so it might be truer to say that there are shared experiences among female-identifying people and non-binary people.