Some meetings are just meant to be and this was one of them. I met Billie at the last panel on the last day of the AWP conference - a panel I hadn't even meant to attend. I was in the wrong room - hey, it was a long conference! By the time I figured that out it was too late. I was sitting close to the front, because I'm always the good student, so I couldn't just get up and walk out. That felt too rude. All the panelists were interesting, but when Billie got up for her portion of the presentation I knew immediately she belonged with our 30 Poets. The poem she reads here was the poem she talked about in the panel and I loved it. The last panel of the last day of any conference usually means everyone in the room bolts for the door when it's over, but Billie not only agreed to stay to record, she seemed happy about it! Connections, that's what AWP is all about, and connecting with this new poet turned my fatigue-made mistake into a gift.
Billie R. Tadros is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at The University of Scranton. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and her M.F.A. in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and she is a graduate of the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University. She is the author of three books of poems, Graft Fixation (Gold Wake Press, 2020), Was Body (Indolent Books, 2020), and The Tree We Planted and Buried You In (Otis Books, 2018), and three chapbooks, Am/Are I (Francis House, 2020), inter: burial places (Porkbelly Press, 2016), and Containers (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in The Boiler, Black Warrior Review, Bone Bouquet, The Collapsar, Crab Fat Magazine, Entropy, Fairy Tale Review, Gigantic Sequins, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Horse Less Review, Kindred, Lavender Review, Menacing Hedge, No Tokens, phoebe, pnk prl, r.kv.r.y., Tupelo Quarterly, White Stag, Wicked Alice, Word Riot, and others, and in the anthologies Bearers of Distance (Eastern Point Press, 2013), Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013), and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014).