In this episode, I talk to Sasha Debevec-McKenney about her poem 'WHAT AM I AFRAID OF?' from her collection Joy is My Middle Name.

Sasha Debevec-McKenney is the author of the poetry collection Joy Is My Middle Name (Fitzcarraldo, 2025). She received her MFA from New York University, was the 2020–2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, and a 2023-2025 Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University. Her poems have appeared in places like The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Drift, and Granta. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut and is currently an Assistant Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University.

Episode notes

• Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets

Book recs:

• Yasmin Zaher, The Coin
• Steven Duong, At the End of the World There is a Pond
• Elisa Gonzales, Grand Tour

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Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.