Alana Folsom is an administrator by day and a poet by night. She earned her MFA from Oregon State University; while earning her MFA–and perhaps more important than her degree–Alana founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of 45th Parallel, OSU’s literary magazine. Her work has been published in the Missouri Review, The Journal, Apogee,  and others, and she was (just!) named a semi-finalist in the 2018 92Y Discovery/ Boston Review Poetry Contest. She is also currently a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine. Alana writes poetry that explores the intersections of grief, female sexuality, and the current political landscape. Borrowing from Carolyn Forche’s concept of “social poetry,” Alana writes from a place where the personal is magnified into the political, and the political is collapsed into the personal. She believes poetry should be both accessible and uncomfortable. Recent favorite reads include Victoria Chang’s Barbie Chang and Analicia Solelo’s Virgin, and she returns to Carl Philips and Louise Gluck whenever she needs to be reminded of the perfect, polished stones poems can become. Right now, she’s trying to tackle Georiga O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz’s love letters (My Faraway One) which includes gems like “Tonight I’d like to paint the world with a broom–and I think I’d like great buckets of color.” Alana agrees with this sentiment mostly daily. Find her talking too fast in the young outskirts of Boston with her cat, Birthday.