7 Poetry Collections by BIPOC Texas Writers
Photo by Pete Alexopoulos on Unsplash Over a decade has passed since I traded the sunny, desert landscape of El
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For a long time, as is often the case with mothers, Zibby Owens’s life was wholly centered on her four children. For more than a decade, the author and host of the podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books was a stay-at-home mom. She was still busy — her preferred state of being, she tells me by Zoom — serving on several nonprofit boards and deeply involved with her kids’ school, but even though she was always on the go, she says there was something missing. “It wasn’t work that fulfilled me deep down,” she says. “I was not as good a mom, honestly.” She recalls a lunch out with one of her mom friends, pretty much her only social outlet for a stretch, someone she was and remains close with. It was only during that lunch that she discovered this close friend had a Ph.D. in psychology. (Owens herself is a graduate of Harvard Business School.) “I’m like, ‘This has never come up. How has this never come up?’” she says. “But I could tell you everything about all four of her kids.” In this stage of her life, many of Owens’s passions took a back seat to the pulls and pushes of mothering. Before she had children, books had always played an important role in her life. Her parents were prolific readers, and between frequent library visits and seeing stacks of books everywhere, that passion rubbed off on her. “The first book I remember falling in love with was Charlotte’s Web ,” she recalls. “I hadn’t finished the section I wanted to before my bedtime and I had to sneak into my bathroom after hours, because I was such a rebel. … Then I remember crying at the end, and it was the first time I had cried from reading anything, and I didn’t realize that books could really make you cry like that.” Not long after, she wrote her first short stories, and her eyes light up as she tells me that her grandparents were so proud they actually made miniature books out of them. […]
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Photo by Pete Alexopoulos on Unsplash Over a decade has passed since I traded the sunny, desert landscape of El
Some time ago–a decade at least, but it feels longer–a literary agent read a manuscript that I’d written and told
