Stephanie Rogers (Poetry) | New York, NY

Stephanie Rogers grew up in Middletown, Ohio and now lives in New York City. In 2003, she received a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Bachelor of Arts in Women’s Studies from The Ohio State University, where she also won the Citino Undergraduate Poetry Prize. She completed her Master’s in English and Comparative Literature in 2005 from the University of Cincinnati, and in 2007, she received her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Three of her poems have been selected for inclusion in the emerging writers anthology Best New Poets. Her poetry has also appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Southern Review, Pleiades, and New Ohio Review, among others. In 2008, she and Amber Leab co-founded the feminist media site, Bitch Flicks, and she currently works as the Managing Editor. Her first collection of poems, Plucking the Stinger, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in October 2016.

Books

Blurbs, Press & Reviews

The hilarity and formal inventiveness of these poems paired with the speaker’s unapologetically morbid worldview make for a terrific read, yes, but it is Stephanie Rogers’ vulnerability in the face of grief that makes Plucking the Stinger an unusually poignant book.
—Cate Marvin, author of Oracle

Buckle your seatbelt because these ain’t your mom’s metaphors; Stephanie Rogers takes her corners fast and her straightaways beyond any safe horizon. In Plucking the Stinger’s fierce odes to staying alive, the moon is “a quarter soaked in lard / and taped to a chalkboard,” or “a rag / dried stiff on a clothesline,” but beauty, and all attempted reconciliations with childhood and fate, in general, and with the suicide of a brother-in-law, in particular, find their place in lines already masterful, and through a posture limned with wit, sorrow, and passion in equal measure. These poems deliver you to life’s door; get in, and go.
—Jessica Greenbaum, author of The Two Yvonnes

Plucking the Stinger is a much-needed, courageous book of poems that twists and tumbles its way into a new, vibrant language for the mind’s unraveling in the face of suffering. Acrobatic, inventive, but above all tender and keen-eyed, these stunning poems are both the wicked firestarter and the welcomed bucket brigade that saves us all in the end.
—Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things

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