If you’re a newsletter subscriber, then you already know we’ve got lots of BIG plans for Black Fox Literary Magazine this year. Today we’re announcing one of them! Over the years, we’ve received requests from poets asking if we ever planned to offer feedback on poetry submissions. Full transparency, we simply didn’t have the staff for it. That changes today!
Our new category for poetry feedback letters is now open on Submittable thanks to our new guest poetry editor, Heather Lang-Cassera! We are so very happy to welcome her to the Black Fox Team! Heather will be coming aboard as a guest editor, concentrating specifically on offering valuable feedback to our poetry submitters who sign up for our feedback letter option. Please join us in welcoming Heather! We’re so lucky to have her on the team!
If you’d like to get to know Heather a little better, check out our mini interview with her below:
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5 Questions for Heather Lang Cassera:
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Black Fox: Why did you start writing poetry?
Heather Lang-Cassera: I was working as a certified veterinary technician in a semi-rural part of Wisconsin and had found myself distanced, in some ways, from my previous creative outlets, like playing saxophone with former bands. I was busy and often tired. A relative was moving out of the country and left a box of books behind. It was filled with poetry titles from Copper Canyon Press, Greywolf Press, and other publishers with whom I was not familiar. Previously, I had thought I disliked poetry, but it turned out I had just never read contemporary poems, or at least not ones to which I felt connected. Within minutes of opening that box, my messy heart knew I had to pursue poetry. I now teach Creative Writing and more at a college in Nevada. Needless to say, that box changed my life!
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BF: What do you love the most about writing poetry?
HLC: I love that, through poetry, I can create images, much like a painter or a sculptor, but I wonder if a poem can, at times, even more seamlessly transcend a singular snapshot or setting. I am forever excited about the ways in which poetry allows me to indulge in my curiosities about our strange, and often lovely, world.
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BF: What can poets expect when they sign up for a feedback letter from you?
HLC: Art, including poetry, is very subjective, and this is important to acknowledge. When I give feedback, I am offering ideas for trying something differently, not necessarily “better.” This is because trying on a variety of new approaches can be a wonderful way to allow each poem to discover the most vibrant and genuine version of itself.
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BF: What advice would you give poets pursuing their dreams?
HLC: Read mindfully. Read what you love, and then think in detail about why you admire a poem or a book of poetry. Take notes—in the margins, on paper, by doodling, etc.—to help you process and remember your thoughts so that you can more readily connect them to your own writing practice. Also, connect with other poets. There are a variety of ways to do this, so we can lean into what feels most authentic and inspiring. Some options include attending open mics, joining library workshops, reviewing books, starting a writing group, taking a class, writing a collaborative poem, etc.
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BF: You have a new book coming out in 2025! What can you tell us about it?
HLC: Thank you so much for asking! My next book, with the working title of Firefall, is coming out with Unsolicited Press. The collection will whisper to us the urgency of climate change. In hushed tones, lyrical free verse and cyclical pantoums will evoke the diminishing and intensifying seasons. These ecopoems will ask the reader to parse out seeming dualities: fire and flood, repetition and redundancy, vulnerable witness and autonomous self. The collection will explore the complexity of language in advocacy and activism, both the tangible effects and the dangers of mere performance. Unsolicited Press published my previous collection, Gathering Broken Light, and I’m deeply grateful to be working with them again.
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If you’d like to receive feedback from Heather on your poetry, sign up here!
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Heather Lang-Cassera is a full-time lecturer with Nevada State College, a Tolsun Books publisher, a 300 Days of Sun Faculty Advisor, and a Clark County, Nevada Poet Laureate Emeritus. She was a 2022 Nevada Arts Council Literary Arts Fellow. She is the author of Gathering Broken Light (Unsolicited Press, 2021), which was written with the support of a Nevada Arts Council grant and won the NYC Big Book Award in Poetry, Social/Political. Her next collection of poems, a book of ecopoems with the working title of Firefall, has been acquired by Unsolicited Press for publication in 2025.
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