Discomfort is a sign that one is working with integrity, says poet Emily Abendroth, a 2013 Pew Fellow. She approaches writing without presupposition, and then presents her finished work outside of the poetry community to the people with whom the work is in conversation. Artistic integrity requires “not always being in a safe place,” she says.
Abendroth has spent the past half-dozen years writing about imprisonment and regimes of control, such as in ]EXCLOSURES[ (Ahsahta Press, 2014). She is the co-editor of Instead of Prisons…, an anthology of writings by incarcerated individuals in the Mid-Atlantic region, forthcoming from Thread Makes Blanket press. Abendroth holds an M.A. in poetry from Temple University and in 2012, she was named a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow.
