Books
Nonbinary poet unmasks society’s gender expectations in new collection
Karen Poppy’s ‘Diving At The Lip Of The Water’ debuts next week
“I started to compose poetry around the age of three – before I could even write,” poet Karen Poppy, 47, told the Blade in a telephone interview. “My Mom would write my poems down.”
“I had the good fortune,” added Poppy, whose first, full-length poetry collection “Diving At The Lip Of The Water” will be out from Beltway Editions, a Washington, D.C. area press, on May 1, “My Mom read poetry to me. The first poem was about a nightingale. Maybe she read Keats to me.” (John Keats was the 19th century Romantic poet who wrote “Ode to a Nightingale.”)
Poppy has written a book “that will rough a reader up and then wrap their scraps in silk,” poet Francesca Bell has said of “Diving At The Lip of The Water.” For Poppy, who identifies as queer, nonbinary, lesbian and an artist, coming out has been a lifelong process. “I’ve come out many times in many ways,” Poppy, who grew up in Foster City, Calif., and now lives in the San Francisco Bay area, said.
April is National Poetry Month. In every month, Poppy thinks often of Walt Whitman, one of the United States’ greatest poets. Thought by many to be queer, Whitman, a nurse in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War, is best known for his groundbreaking work “Leaves of Grass.”
Whitman comes to mind to Poppy when she talks about her identity. “As an artist,” Poppy said in reference to how she identifies, “I’m everyone and everything.”
When Whitman talks about the self containing “multitudes,” “He’s not just speaking of individuals,” Poppy said, “he’s saying that poets-artists enter into everything.”
“As an artist – a poet,” Poppy said, “I don’t like to be put into boxes.”
Poppy celebrates Whitman’s creative spirit, refusal to have limitations placed on him and, what she called, “his joyous experience of limitlessness and connectivity with everything.”
As a young child, Poppy sensed that she was different. “I knew very early on,” she said, “I wanted to be like my mother and my father.”
She wanted to be glam like her mom. “My Mom’s family’s nickname for Mom was Miss America,” Poppy said.
She wore her Dad’s leather jacket, cowboy hat and cowboy boots. “Early on, I got in trouble for trying to smoke a cigarette,” Poppy said, “I put it in the wrong way. I was lucky I didn’t burn my mouth!”
“I cut my mouth, trying to shave as a toddler,” she added, “I was already creating my own gender identity.”
At a time, when people were far less out and proud than now, Poppy crushed on her girl babysitters. “In kindergarten, I got in trouble with my best friend at the time,” she said, “because I told her that I was interested in her physically.”
“I think she was very kind about it,” Poppy added.
That same year, Poppy was reprimanded by her teacher for kissing a boy. “The boy and I were in line waiting to go back to the classroom,” she said, “he kissed me back.”
During that era, Poppy didn’t have the words to name or describe her feelings. “I have a gay cousin who’s older than me,” she said, “and a lesbian aunt. But because they weren’t exactly the way I am, I didn’t realize I was queer, too.”
In Foster City, when she was growing up, people didn’t talk openly about being queer. “We talked about it in euphemisms and negatively,” Poppy said.
A poem is never just the story of what happened or the recitation of fact, poet Sheila Black, a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellow, said in an email to the Blade.
Poppy’s poetry, like that of many poets, at times, channels her life. Though, it’s not autobiographical in a literal or linear way. Like Whitman’s work, it contains multitudes from individual and collective experience.
Her searing, moving collection “Diving At The Lip Of The Water,” unmasks society’s gender expectations and family systems. Poppy’s poem, “No One was Gay Back Then,” draws us into what it’s like to have to hide your sexuality. “We used to make fun of you/You, making out with Michael/in the grass. 5th grade recess,” the poem begins.
“Michael liked Matt. So in 5th grade,” Poppy writes in the poem, “already seeking cover-ups/Trying to convince everyone and ourselves./Our small town. No one was gay back then.”
As a tween, Poppy not only realized she was queer (though she didn’t have the word for it); she knew where she wanted to go to college. Poppy was determined to go to Smith College because Sylvia Plath went there.
“When I was 12, I started to read Sylvia Plath,” Poppy said. “Plath has been a profound influence on me throughout my life.”
“Because of her fearlessness in speaking her truth,” Poppy added, “and her high level of poetic virtuosity.”
Poppy’s dream came true. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Smith College in Comparative Literature and Spanish in 1998.
At Smith, Poppy began to come out about her identity. But, there were pressures. “I was pressured into cutting my hair short,” she said, “the feeling was if I kept my hair long, I wasn’t a dyke.”
Poppy cut her hair. “I did cry,” she said, “there was a pressure to conform to a certain aesthetic. You had to be super femme or butch.”
It was another box that she had a hard time escaping from. “I realized boxes are not for me,” Poppy said.
She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do after she graduated from Smith. After a short stint as a chef apprentice, Poppy could tell that being a chef for the long term wasn’t for her.
Like most poets, Poppy knew being a bard rarely brings financial stability. “I wanted to have security and I wanted to help people,” Poppy said.
“I went to law school and studied international law,” she said, “A lot of my early focus was on immigration and helping refugees.”
Poppy graduated from UC Hastings College of the Law (now known as UC College of the Law, San Francisco) in 2003 with a J.D. degree in international law.
Today, Poppy works for The Hartford in the area of workers’ compensation.
Poppy kept writing from her childhood into her 20s. “But then, somebody said something really cruel about my writing,” she said. “The ridicule chilled my creativity.”
For 17 years, because of this cruelty, she didn’t write. “I was in a creative silence,” Poppy said.
A traumatic event compelled her to go back to writing.
Since 2017, when her creativity was restarted, Poppy’s poetry has been published in literary journals, anthologies as well as the chapbooks “Crack Open/Emergency,” “Our Own Beautiful Brutality” and “Every Possible Thing.” She’s written three unpublished novels and short stories.
One of her writing projects is Whitmanesque in its intersections of identities.
Poppy is working on an opera libretto. “It takes place when Handel [the German-British Baroque composer] was alive,” she said.
It’s about a merboy who’s washed to shore. He’s young, Black and queer.
“A family takes him in,” Poppy said, “they want to make him a form of income.”
The family forces the merboy to become a castrato, Poppy said, “they make him wear a mask to hide his dark skin. When he’s older and has a relationship with a man, he has to be closeted.”
Poppy is looking for a composer to work with her on her libretto. If you’re interested, contact her through her website karenpoppy.com.
Poppy’s interest in immigrants is personal as well as professional. Poppy is Jewish. Some of her family were murdered in the Holocaust. “Others in my family left Europe before the Holocaust because of pogroms and poverty,” she said.
When her family came to the United States in the early 1900s, they were “very poor,” Poppy said.
Her paternal grandmother, Poppy said, told her to make sure her son always had food, “because hunger would make his stomach hurt.”
We’ve come to see that the American dream is in many ways an illusion, Poppy said. It’s not accessible to all, and it’s slipping away.
“Elizabeth/The fifth of ten children/Who crossed the border, then/Still a child/,” Poppy writes in her poem “Elizabeth,” “Only sixteen and wanting to stay alive/To be the breath that survived.”
Poppy worries about the rise of anti-Semitism. “It comes in waves,” she said. “We have to remind each other to make sure it never happens again.”
It’s important for artists to take care of themselves, Poppy said. To get enough rest between creative projects. To be an athlete. So their minds and spirits can be in top form.
Poppy does yoga and loves to run. “A poem is a short lap,” she said, “writing a novel is like long distance open water swimming.”
“We write out of our humanity,” Poppy added.
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Books
Dolly Parton biography puts her hardships into context
‘Ain’t Nobody’s Fool’ a highly researched tome not to be missed
‘Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton’
By Martha Ackmann
c.2026, St. Martin’s Press
$30/304 pages
Not too bright.
That’s what people once thought about you. Your language didn’t conform, you had your own sense of style, and you were ignorant about modern things and places and foods. But you were no dummy. You were different, and you had a secret: as in the new biography, “Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton” by Martha Ackmann, you knew exactly where you were going.
When Avie Lee Owens and Lee Parton first married, they had the very basics: “two knives, two forks, two spoons, a skillet, a butcher knife, and an old iron kettle.” He was 17; she was 15. Babies came quick. The fourth one was named Dolly, after two great-aunts.
Almost from the time she could walk, Dolly sang. Before she was old enough to attend school, she wrote poetry, and she’d begun to notice rhythms and beats she could make with her fingers. As a schoolchild, she created her own musical instruments out of scraps, and she was eager to perform whenever anyone asked her – and they asked often, because Dolly Parton was a nice girl, and her sense of humor conveyed a warmth that drew people in.
Growing up in the Tennessee mountains, Parton was independent, shunning marriage and child-raising, instead focusing on a dream of being a star. By the time she was in high school, she’d had a regular gig on local television but she recognized that there were few opportunities for fame in the mountains, so she left for Nashville the day after high school graduation, with the snickers of naysayers ringing in her ears.
She stayed with an aunt and uncle there, and she beat the streets, dined on grocery store samples to get by, and missed her family and friends. And they worried about her, but they knew nothing would derail her plans. They knew Dolly would be fine.
As a friend said, “’She had her head on pretty good.’”
Chances are that if you’ve listened to music any time in the last 60 years, you’ve heard Dolly Parton through her words or her music or both. Now you need to learn more about her, and “Ain’t Nobody’s Fool” is where to do it.
Here’s a biography that grabs you on the first page with the tiniest bit of family tree, but not so much that you get bored with it. Author Martha Ackmann writes about Dolly Parton’s early life, putting hardships and experiences in context, both personally and historically. There are name-drops, but not overly so, as Ackmann takes you through Parton’s career, her heartbreaks, her marriage, and her years with Porter Wagoner, in detail but not dramatically embellished or outrageously told. It’s a biography that’s just right, sourced well and written with a fresh take that, like its subject, tells a good story.
Fans, of course, will want this highly researched book but music lovers of any age or type will eat it up. That means you, so use up that Christmas gift certificate. “Ain’t Nobody’s Fool” just shines.
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Books
Historiography with heart
Pioneering author John D’Emilio continues to enlighten us in new book ‘Making Gay History’
‘Making Gay History, Memoir of a Scholar-Activist’
By John D’Emilio
Dukeupress.edu/making-gay-history
“Dear Dr. Kameny,” wrote the earnest graduate history student almost 50 years ago. “As you know, the academic community only rarely deemed the lives of gay men and women to be worthy of serious scholarly study. To my knowledge, no American history faculty at a major university has yet sponsored a dissertation that deals with gays historically.”
That student was a young man from the Bronx who would change all that. His name is John D’Emilio.
“I must be able to uncover ‘manuscript’ sources, that is unpublished and unique historical materials,” he explained to D.C. gay civil rights pioneer Dr. Franklin E. Kameny who lived in a house stacked to the ceiling with “unique historical materials.” In reality, these were piles of correspondence with government officials and politicians, legal filings, mimeograph copies, gay newspapers, press releases, Mattachine Society brochures and picket signs. Frank Kameny, a self-described “pack rat,” invited D’Emilio into his private world of papers and memorabilia to begin uncovering an erased and forgotten pre-Stonewall history. This was one of many such research forays into “basements, garages and overcrowded living rooms” across America conducted by John D’Emilio. He was a young man on fire to complete a Ph.D. dissertation at the frontier of a distant galaxy — writing a scholarly gay and lesbian history backed by original research where there had been none, only a void.
Reading D’Emilio’s memoir “Making Gay History” (2026, Duke University Press) one has the sense of watching an emerging galaxy spinning around a galactic core of New York scholars and their mentors, young activists, and community historians throbbing with the New York City energy celebrated by Walt Whitman a century before in his epic poem “Mannahatta”. Spinning out of the ‘60s anti-Vietnam War activism; Marxist historical analysis, the Stonewall riots and gay liberation, we can see it coalescing around this one history student’s search for a dissertation topic and himself piecing together a new history that “no one had yet written about … a pioneering work in this newly emerging field.” D’Emilio pitches his idea for a dissertation that “spanned the length of U.S. history, moving from the religious teachings that shaped law and social attitudes … to how the federal government dealt with the increasing visibility of a homosexual world in the twentieth century.” With the blessings of Columbia’s Department of History, he completed his dissertation leading to the publication of his groundbreaking history: “Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States” (1983). When he received his first copy of the bound book in the mail, he “cradled the book in my arm holding it close to my chest….It was as if I had fathered a child.”
More so, D’Emilio fathered a new history. Historiography is the story of how history gets written, conducting original research, uncovering the data and creating the narrative(s) — often a snoozing read of academic process. But not this historiography. “Making Gay History” is a historiography with heart.
“Nothing was going to stop me from giving everything I had to this effort at making change in society and myself,” he declares while connecting with others who share his “boundless excitement for the collection of documents.” There were many others in this spiral with D’Emilio who are mentioned and play important roles. In the spiral were Jonathan Ned Katz (“Gay American History”, 1976); Allan Berube (“Coming Our Under Fire” 1990), Martin Duberman (“Hidden from History”, 1989); Daughters of Bilitis activists Del Martin and Barbara Gittings; Civil War historian Eric Foner and author/activist Larry Kramer. No libertarians among them. Well, maybe the divine Bette Midler who was well known for performing uptown at the Continental Baths who makes an appearance at a Washington Square rally.
He craved his parents’ approval. Among the most riveting scenes in the memoir are a series of family dinners in the Bronx with his old-school parents who go into near shock when he tells them he is gay. How to evade this any longer, especially now that his dissertation is going to be on homosexuality? It is a moving and hilarious sequence. After he says it out loud, “I am gay”: “No. No. No!” his father gasps. “This can’t be true. It can’t be.” D’Emilio thinks, “Oh my God, he’s going to die. I’ve killed my father.”
The D’Emilios — Vincent and Sophie — so resemble the wonderful Castorinis in “Moonstruck,” I am thinking “Oh my God, this is Cher coming out to her parents Cosmo and Rose.” The young graduate student survives the family dramatics even more certain that this was not just his success but “a gay liberation success.” From the family dinner table to the streets, he writes how he marched in the 1973 Pride parade beneath a banner held high: “Gay Socialists.” This man is a born scholar-activist.
D’Emilio does not seem able to pull back. There are passages that veer into autobiographical minutia, detail about the grind to earn a living from the University of North Carolina Greensboro to the University of Illinois Chicago. He writes, ”I would be living on less than half my usual salary for the year, but with the small amount of royalties that I got for my three books, plus some occasional speaking gigs and dipping into savings…”. Much of this is gray matter compared to the galaxy John D’Emilio helped energize that even now brightens our sky.
Charles Francis is president of The Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. and author of “Archive Activism: Memoir of a ‘Uniquely Nasty’ Journey” (University of North Texas, 2023)
Books
New book examines fashionista Audrey Smaltz’s fabulous life
‘Every Inch a Lady’ reveals finding true love with another woman
‘Every Inch a Lady’
By Audrey Smaltz with Alina Mitchell
c.2026, Amistad
$27.99/256 pages
Snaps, zippers, buttons, ties.
Toss that garment on, pull it up, wrap it around, you know what you like and how to wear it. The color is perfect for your skin tone, the fabric enhances your form. Yep, you always look your best and, as in the new book “Every Inch a Lady” by Audrey Smaltz (with Alina Mitchell), that best is fabulous.
”Born, bred, toasted, buttered, jellied, and honeyed in Harlem” in 1937, Audrey Smaltz was a force to be reckoned with almost from the time she could walk. Her parents imbued confidence in her, they nurtured her creativity and sent her to charm school, but they never allowed her to create a stir.
“That,” says Smaltz, “is not what ladies did.”
By the time she was a teenager, Smaltz was modeling for New York City designers. Shortly thereafter, she started working for a married man with whom she had an affair, and whom she loved very much. She broke up with him, attended college, worked a series of jobs that taught her about fashion and jobs that didn’t seem to fit her. An ill-fated marriage took her to Chicago where she ultimately landed a position that sent her to work in Ebony magazine’s New York office.
Working at Ebony was a career-changer, in a way. Smaltz was able to travel the world and learn more about fashion, but she didn’t exactly get along with her boss.
Finally, seizing an opportunity, Smaltz decided to launch her own company, Audrey Smaltz, Inc., a “fashion production business,” but she couldn’t get any designers to take a chance on her. Undaunted, she reorganized, re-branded, hit the streets, and knocked on doors until she finally found one client, which led to many others.
Through it all, her personal life was a whirlwind. She dated “more men than you can shake a book at,” settling down occasionally, briefly. Fashion had always been her first love, but she accidentally found real love, “the love of a woman,” at a leadership course.
There’s an old saying that writers need to add lots of “color” into their stories. Read a little of “Every Inch a Lady,” and you’ll notice immediately that author Audrey Smaltz (with Alina Mitchell) quite literally takes that to heart by mentioning nearly every color of the spectrum here. Hmm.
That oddity aside, Smaltz is a wonderfully lively storyteller, speaking with the energy of a woman much younger to the heart of anyone who loves fashion. That glee extends to collectors of vintage clothing, who will be delighted to read about the industry long ago and the way things worked then. Smaltz says she experienced racism, which is not unusual for pre-Civil Rights America, but doors were surprisingly closed for other reasons that will astound anyone who’s savvy about the fashion industry, even today.
There’s quite a bit of name-dropping in this book but most of it belongs in the anecdotes, so you likely won’t mind. If you’re a fashionista, too, find “Every Inch a Lady,” and snap it up.
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