Why Queer Poetry?

I met Riley M. Hollars during the Baltimore AWP conference back in March, and she convinced me that The Queer Love Project should regularly be publishing poetry. After she convinced me, I asked if she wanted to be our Poetry Editor, and she said yes! Since then, we launched our first monthly poetry drop, which included a handful of fantastic poems.

Ahead of our August drop, I wanted to chat with Riley, so all of you wonderful supporters could meet her and learn a bit more about what she’s looking for, her style of editing, and what keeps her inspired creatively. We had a fantastic time chatting on Sunday, and here’s a quick recap in case you don’t have time to listen/watch our entire conversation.

“I’m really looking forward to focusing back on poetry right now because it was very academically focused,” Riley explained of her priorities now that she’s finished her MA in literature at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

“There wasn’t a lot of space for writing. so I’m really looking to get into collaborative spaces and spaces that are kind of experimentally working with the academic side, blending the poetic side, blending the creative side, and really breaking down that binary.”

“I usually go for narrative in poems,” Riley said. “There is no one set formula for how I’m choosing these poems, but there’s typically a decent narrative.”

“I think we all have people who we might not even speak to anymore, but who are embedded in our queer realizations, our coming out stories,” she continued, “So I’m always looking for that kind of note of narrative.”

“I’m also looking for Just beauty within the language,” Riley explained. “Most of the things that I ask for edits on are just clichés—I don’t want to see clichés in poetry—especially funny phrases that have been around forever.”

I added that the one word that I’ve forbidden and often cut out of people’s prose is the word “countless”—listen in if you want to hear more (that’s at the 18:09 mark).

I then asked Riley a series of rapid-fire questions which she hadn’t prepped for, and I was excited to learn a lot about her tastes and how her mind works.

“Nikki Giovanni has some really lovely poems to return to,” Riley said. “But I’m really bad at remembering titles!”

Nikki Giovanni is one of my personal favorites as well. If you want to check out her collected works you can find a volume here, plus there’s also a collection of her “love poems” available.

We then discussed a few “controversial” thoughts about Mary Oliver and Joan Didion. If you’re not familiar with queer poet Mary Oliver’s work, there’s a new documentary about the poet that released this summer.

“I can’t remember the name of it right now, but when I was at AWP, I was handed a zine made out of 8.5-by-11 piece of letter paper, about the perils of a shrimp. … It was like the perilous life of the shrimp. And it was ridiculously thoughtful for being this little eight-page zine.”

“And I think less for that specific story, but I think more to remind people how impactful small things would be. I would like to hand things like that directly to people.”

We then hatched a plan to make our own little zines to hand out next time we gather together for AWP in Chicago in March 2027—so stay tuned!

“I think very often about Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing schedule,” Riley shared. “Wake up; eat a good breakfast; write for like six hours straight—she wrote from like 7 to like 2 p.m. or something—and then it was like, have a hearty lunch, write your correspondence, and then something like, I do tend to do a lot of stupid things in the evening hours and we won’t talk about that.”

“The lifestyle I would love to embody is not the lifestyle that I do embody. I’m a very chaotic editor. … But it’s usually in the evening.”

Riley shared “Bruises Off the Peach” by Ryan Beatty—a new song to me!

“He’s cutting the bruises off of the peach because it doesn’t affect the taste of the fruit. It’s just a really beautiful song!”

“I’m often left a little disappointed with the presentations. I’m just constantly thinking, like, why can we not have TV shows that have queer characters without either feeling forced or feeling like they’re written in this artificial sense,” Riley confessed. “But a movie I did enjoy was Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Despite what happens, it’s not overly melodramatic, and it feels very to the point.”

“Oh gosh, I would really love to read just like the most melodramatic poetry that Elio 100-percent writes for Oliver’s character in Call Me By Your Name. I want to read that so bad!”

Riley also added that she’s frustrated that “sapphic desire” isn’t portrayed as front-and-center as male-on-male love is in pop culture (such as in Heated Rivalry or Heartstopper). Give us more sapphic love stories please!

Riley reiterated that there is a rolling submission for the monthly queer poetry drop. The next one is scheduled for August 2, so if you have any poetry you’d like to submit, send today, otherwise, it may be included in the September one. Plus, you can read her mission statement here.

“I do read everyone’s poetry aloud as well, so that often goes into my decision-making,” Riley added. “And the unsung hero of this would be my partner—who gets absolutely no recognition—who I make listen to me talk through all of these edits out loud. Because I need someone to pretend they’re listening to me—which might be my fatal flaw—and talking to the cat just got really boring.”