Lauren Slaughter
Photo by Elizabeth DeRamus
Bio
Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the author of the poetry collections a lesson in smallness (National Poetry Review Press, 2015) and Spectacle (Panhandler Books, forthcoming). She wrote the libretto for Already Root, a one-act opera composed by Maxwell Dulaney and performed by the Talea Ensemble in 2019. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and winner of RHINO’s Founder’s prize. Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Image, 32 Poems, Tupelo Quarterly, New South, Pleiades, On the Seawall, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and Kenyon Review Online, among many other places. She holds an MFA in both poetry and fiction from the University of Alabama and is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where she is also editor-in-chief of NELLE, a literary journal that publishes writing by women.
To receive this astonishing support from the NEA is an incredible gift and I am absolutely buoyed by it. Adam Zagajewski cautions not to “allow the lucid moment to dissolve,” but it’s often impossible to prioritize those moments inspiration shines because, well, the kids need snacks (or, more recently, virtual school proctoring), work demands call, the news overwhelms, and the routine tasks of the day must be tended to. For the most part, we find a way to make the writing happen anyway—we have to. But writing often becomes the thing fit in between other priorities instead of the primary focus. I am picturing the hours ahead of me working on my next collection of poems and perhaps some in-progress projects, including a book of stories and a novel. Yet what I’m craving most is the receptivity that comes when one has the space and energy to invite the unexpected to show up. I hope to engage in work I can’t even imagine yet. I promise not to waste a single “lucid moment.” Thank you.