Originally from the Mississippi Delta, Laura Isabela Amsel now lives near Charleston, South Carolina. She holds an MA in Spanish from Middlebury College. Poems have appeared in recent issues of Terrain, Harbor Review, Common Ground Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Cloudbank, wildness, Another Chicago Review, The Swannanoa Review, Nimrod International Journal, Atlanta Review, and The MacGuffin. Her poem “Father” won the 2022 Monica Taylor Poetry Prize, and her poem “Cain” won the 2022 Mikrokosmos Poetry Prize, judged by A.E. Stallings. Her first book, A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet, won the 2024 Brick Road Poetry Prize and was published by Brick Road Poetry Press. A chapbook manuscript, Weathering Pen, was a finalist in the Beyond Words and Vallum chapbook contests. Her second book, tentatively titled Neither Conjured Nor Denied is nearly complete.

 

Of her work Laura says, “By the time I came to poetry in 2016 after a breast cancer diagnosis, my study of the Spanish language had already awakened in me a love of the sounds of words, of how they feel in your mouth when spoken aloud, and of the nuances of meaning that change and grow richer over time. Words also afforded me the power to manage the unmanageable, to reimagine endings, to make of the chaotic and the ugly beautiful arrangements. A mother of four children, I have come to think that a poem is like a child–a willful, uncontrollable creature that needs to assert its independence to become what it is meant to become. The best poems are the ones the poet cannot quite control, the ones that insist on becoming themselves.”