Ansley Moon is the author of the poetry collection, How to Bury the Dead (Black Coffee Press). She has been awarded fellowships and honors from Kundiman, Dickinson House and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Sejal Shah’s debut collection of essays, This Is One Way to Dance, was published this past June by the University of Georgia Press in the midst of the intensifying COVID-19 pandemic and protests against police brutality. In the months that followed, poet Ansley Moon corresponded with Shah about how her new collection came together; the lyric essay as a hybrid and nonbinary resistance to fixed genres; what it means to write and create in this cultural moment; and about home and belonging. The following interview is edited for length and clarity.
This November, to recognize and honor National Adoption Awareness Month, I've invited adoptee poet Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello to curate a folio of poems by 10 Asian American adoptees. This page features “Girls” by Ansley Moon. I invite you to take a moment to read her moving introduction to the folio here, as well as the other nine poems in this collection.
— Eugenia Leigh, Poetry Editor