I’ve been on a summer hiatus of sorts since my graduation and the end of my children’s school year. I’ve done the family vacation thing and the hanging-at-the-pool-with-the-kids thing and not a whole lot of anything else until this month.

Now I’m honored to be editing submissions for The Lost Daughters Anthology, which is due to be published this fall. The essays and poems in this collection speak to the complicated lives we navigate as adopted women. Though many of the pieces have appeared previously on Lost Daughters and other blogs, they somehow read differently when combined in this format with each other and the as-yet-unpublished pieces. The oneness of our journey reaches through our individual tales, connecting us to each other and to every other adopted person. I can’t wait for everyone to read this book!

In other news, a poem of mine called “Swimming” has been published in The Reach of Song 2013, the anthology of the Georgia Poetry Society.

On July 25, I’ll join my friends at Flycatcher in hosting “One Good Place No. 2,” the second event in what we plan to be a regular live reading series in suburban Atlanta. We’re also reading now for Issue 3, due to be published in September.

As this summer nears it’s conclusion (my kids go back to school in four weeks!), it’s time for me to review the work I did for my master’s thesis and get my own book manuscript in shape. It’s always a good idea for me to put work aside for a while, so that I can better evaluate it as a first-time reader would. I’m sure that in doing so, I’ll find areas that aren’t quite ready for prime time, but that’s okay. I’m looking forward to getting back to writing.