“I’m from a small farming town in central Missouri, along the river bottoms of the Missouri River. Growing up queer and neurodivergent in a conservative Christian household, I was rather lonely and turned to reading and writing. It provided solace and an escape, sometimes out of my own head, and I found that I could not have survived without these practices and the ability to express my world and myself in these ways.

I write a lot about my childhood and about the beauty and brutality in the forgotten landscape where I’m from—the abandoned barns and houses, the abundance of waste, trash, and decay that I find beautiful and fascinating. I write about the conflict of labor among wildlife and my role in that as a witness and participant. Of course, there is queer desire and heartbreak in my poetry as well. It’s funny, I actually started out wanting to be a fiction writer, with my prose vignettes, until one of my professors told me that I wasn’t actually writing prose—I was writing poetry.

I entered the National Poetry Series thinking, ‘Maybe it’ll work out and maybe it won’t.’ NPS is a program that, through an open competition, selects five poets each year for publication and pairs the manuscripts with participating presses. I had been sending out my debut collection to several places without any luck, so I couldn’t, and still quite can’t, believe that it was one of the winners—and that Brenda Hillman read and selected it. That was really shocking to see that she saw something in my poetry because I adore her work. I feel very grateful and fortunate, and I’m excited and nervous about the book coming out. Mostly excited.”

—Kieron Walquist, creative writing doctoral candidate and winner of the 2024 National Poetry Series