In a few weeks I will be presenting my cinepoems from White Stockings at Stanford. Many, many thanks to visual artist Tess Cortes for her vision and aesthetic. She made each woman come to life!

I’ve written and produced my final poetry book, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). It took roughly two years to write. After one year of a frightening, violating political climate and three years’ estrangement from my family, this book was a labor of necessity. MOFA is an epigenetic poetic diary that explores inherited trauma from my mother’s side of the family (displaced from North Caucasus -> Lithuania -> Brazil -> Canada -> US) and my father’s side (displaced from Lithuania -> Germany -> US).

The book is now available via Lulu from Secret Airplanes Press.

I want to sincerely thank Robert Hansen at Poems-For-All for publishing two of my poems as mini-books to be “scattered like seeds” into the universe.

Here’s a brief cinepoem teaser to re-introduce my poetry collection, White Stockings (2015/2016). I put this together in Adobe Spark in about 5 hours (my second attempt at video production/editing). I’m collaborating with an actual, real-life, super-talented visual artist, Tess Cortes (check her out, she’s quite amazing). I’ll be unveiling about 5-6 cinepoems at the AABS Conference at Stanford in June.

My poetry book, White Stockings, is available on lulu.com, however, I’ve been creating a series of cinepoems based upon it. The video below is my first attempt, using my own still photos from a “White Stockings”-inspired photo shoot in 2015. It was created in iMovie, before I started tutoring myself in Adobe Premiere.