my name is samari zysk (sam for short!) and i am an MFA graduate from Mills College. i also run a poetry zine called Maw: Poetry Magazine! in my free time, i enjoy reading critical theory, watching dumb sitcoms, making messy art, and/or contemplating global affairs over very strong coffee.

​

i grew up between rural Oregon and Salt Lake City, Utah - a weird juxtaposition, to be sure! i was obsessed with dragons, vampires, and other monsters from a very young age, and spent hours upon hours at our small-town library with my brother.

​

these two topics - monsters and books - have not once lost my interest, even as i grew and moved to Olympia, Washington to earn my Bachelor in Arts degree from The Evergreen State College. i used to exclusively want to write stories, and even managed to finish writing a fantasy novel called Forget Me Not while attending Evergreen.

​

however, upon taking a class with Tara Hardy, i found that my goals had changed. like me, Tara was a survivor of child sexual abuse, and wrote poetry in order to create a manifesta of her recovery. i'd had a history of writing poetry, but until Tara, i had never dreamed of sharing it. this class (actually, Tara Hardy) changed my life.

​

oh, but i am still very much obsessed with dragons, vampires, yōkai, golems, demons, and all the beasties! during my residency at Mills College's MFA in Creative Writing program, i wrote and collected poems for my thesis, monster parts. as it happens, this collection has also been picked up for publication by Alien Buddha Press, and you can buy it on Amazon here!

​

monster parts is a dissection of the roles in a traumatic event, those being the survivor, the perpetrator of violence, and the event of trauma itself. this thesis uses monsters as an idea to unite those roles in their shared taboo. to quote Mark Doty: "Poetry's project is to use every aspect of language to its maximum effectiveness, finding within it nuances and powers we otherwise could not hear." (The Art of Description: World Into Word, p. 76)