This collection was selected as the First Place Winner for the MAYDAY 2023 Micro-Chapbook Poetry contest.
“Reading Neat Panic gives me tingles at the top of my head! I’m struck by the dazzle, syntactic richness, and alliterative pyrotechnics across each poem. There’s a lyrical dexterity in delicious lines. ‘Faucet water turned / amniotic fluid.’ Through photosynthesis and the siren song, these poems are written for an alchemical future, one that calls for ‘a third thing’ beyond records of atrocity and poison. A large nourishing exhale! I find both sanctuary and ‘the tilt of destruction’ speaking at the ends of an impossible earth. ‘If we do not make it into the calculus, how / should we be counted’ lives eternally in mind. Metamorphosis. Melody. Delight.”
– Sophia Terazawa, 2023 Micro-Chapbook Contest Judge
Read Chapbook Here
JULIA MALLORY is committed to being a good steward of, and vessel for her ancestors’ stories. As a storyteller, her foundational creative love language is poetry, and she moves between genres from fiction to filmmaking, with a range of mediums from text to textiles. In addition, she is the founder of the creative container, Black Mermaids.
Julia’s work can be found in A Gathering Together, Barrelhouse, the Black Speculative Arts Movement’s “Curating the End of the World: RED SPRING IV – Wildseeds & Black Futures”, The Offing, Raising Mothers, Sugarcane Magazine, Torch Literary Arts, 68 to 05, petrichor, SISTORIES, Emergent Literary, and elsewhere. She is also a poetry editor for The Loveliest Review.
Julia is an emerging filmmaker whose work has screened from Toronto to Iceland. Her latest loves include creating stop-motion animated collages and building TEN OH! SIX, a multi-generational community space for collective learning, connection, and creativity.
Julia is the mother of three children and is from the Southside of Harrisburg, which she affectionately refers to as “the lil chocolate city that tries.” For more information, visit www.thejuliamallory.com.
