On July 23, 2021, I had an hour+ dialogue with Elena Karina Byrne over Zoom about her artistic process.  She will release her fourth book If This Makes You Nervous with Omnidawn in October 2021 and a separate chapbook entitled No, Don’t with What Books Press in 2020. She has also just completed a book of published, “interrupted” essays: Voyeur Hour: Poetry, Art, Film, & Desire. As part of her interdisciplinary work, she is writing screenplays and short stories while enrolled in Antioch University Santa Barbara's MFA program in Writing & Contemporary Media.

Former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena is a freelance lecturer, editor, Poetry Consultant & Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club. In 2018 she completed her three years as one of the final judges for the Kate & Kingsley Tufts Awards in Poetry. In 2019, Elena was one of only three poets selected to be a guest lecturer for the Georgia Poetry Circuit at 10 colleges and universities

A Pushcart Prize recipient, her publications include the Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Verse Daily, BOMB, diode, The Kyoto Journal, Persea Books anthology, The Eloquent Poem, Poetry International, LARB, Blackbird, Narrative, Entropy, Adroit Journal, and New American Writing, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere.

Elena read two poems during the program: "Praise to the End" by Theodore Roethke and "Pastoral" by Forrest Gander.

A special note of gratitude for our original theme music was composed and performed by Cato and Creative Soundscapes.