Poetry is always something that I felt came naturally to me as an outlet. At some point in my adolesence, I started writing poetry about how I was feeling in notebooks and on my phone. Most of these poems were only read immediately after writing them and never shared with anyone, unless I was attempting to impress some girl with some sloppy poetic representation of how I was feeling about them or life in that moment. While attending Indiana University Southeast (IUS) in pursuit of a English degree, I was met with confusion when our instructors would ask us to decipher poems that would be presented in the classroom.

It was clear who had taken poetry classes and who hadn’t. When I saw that it was being offered online in the summer of 2022, I decided to dive head first into the Writing Poetry class offered by Dr. William Allegrazza. I had heard horror stories about some of the poetry classes at IUS that my peers in the English department had gone through, so when I found out Dr. Allegrazza was a published poet my anxieties grew. However, after taking his 8-week offering of Writing Poetry, a lot (definitely not all) of the anxieties I had around academic writing and sharing my poetry with my peers and instructors have faded away.

I hope that is easily recgonizable by this Chapbook and that Dr. Allegrazza and anyone else that stumbles across this Chapbook will enjoy it.