Creating sparks in darkness

How better to start the year than with poems? Over the next month I'll be writing daily (along with my Tupelo cohort) to get 2025 kicked off with inspired feet! I feel often that the world we're in is a mess these days, and that I'm powerless to do anything about it. And yet, there are poems. Sparks in the darkness: of beauty, of connectivity, of anger and of solace.

Supporting my journey here over the next thirty means you're with me in this mess, and, like me, you want to see more sparks light up the darkness.

The low-down: Tupelo Press provides the canvas; I bring my words, writing thirty poems in thirty days. 30/30 poems have been taken by over 200 journals and featured in over 40 published chapbooks, all so Tupelo Press can keep publishing exquisite and diverse voices that might never be heard otherwise.

Every dollar gives me confidence to write more, and helps the press place more poems in gorgeous books. Help me to help this distinguished press. Give today!

Doctor, poet, and small business owner Joanna Lee is a founder of local writing community River City Poets. Her work has been published in JAMA, Rattle, Contemporary American Voices and elsewhere. She is the author of Dissections (2017) and co-editor of the anthology Lingering in the Margins (2019); more recently, she collaborated with the Richmond Symphony to create “Letter to the City,” which premiered at the Carpenter Theatre to sold out crowds in February 2024. She is the current Poet Laureate for the city of Richmond.