Hey! I’m Kaley.

I am a poet; I am a teacher; I am a Blue Ridge Virginian to my core; I am a daughter; I am a sister; I’m a place-maker.

I’m from Charlottesville originally, and I’m living in Roanoke to pursue my MFA in poetry at Hollins. I’m also an Adjunct Professor of English at Virginia Western and regularly participate in Star City Poets shenanigans. My poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in EPOCH, The Adroit Journal, Witness, and several other journals. I’m learning the names of trees. I cook chicken meatballs most weeks. I believe wasps are majestic. I love God.

I work in poetry, essay, and spoken breath!

In many ways, writing is my practice of place-making. I inhabit language to listen to inherited soil, to investigate it. I’m a poet of vantage points, and in my work, I face and confront the sites that possess me: my hometown of Charlottesville, where white supremacists invaded in 2017; Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, the plantation my ancestors perpetuated from 1840–1946; my woman body, which is fallible as my language but houses me with care. My book-length manuscript “Wasp House” carries out these investigations through Virginia archival research, site visits, and contrapuntal interludes called “hallways” between sections that act as “rooms.” Poetic architecture is my practice of loving the world. I’m constantly asking poetry to reshape what my blood can do.

Right now, I’m especially interested in tensions of shape and container—how might formal experimentation operate as a kind of place-making? How can a sonnet look like a prose poem and still be a sonnet? How can a contrapuntal poem hold apparent opposites in a way that fuels lyric velocity? How can silence be a restraining force for the line? I’m curious about what poem-containers arise in a bus setting, which is a kind of liminal site, a communal place moving through space.

Ultimately, I hope my poems act as gathering grounds, structures and topographies built to hold both grief and joy, beauty and terror, the heartwrench of our history and the bewildering blueprint of the future. I write so I can be brave. So I can craft a place to touch what’s true. I want this courage and contact for my readers too.

Recently, I’ve been trying to expand my definition of civic action. Federal agents are killing people on Minnesota streets, breaking into Columbia dorms, and I am in Roanoke baking bread. I am in Roanoke taking out the trash. I am in Roanoke staring at a gibbous moon. I am in Roanoke drafting syllabi. I am in Roanoke writing a letter of recommendation for my student’s financial aid to be reinstated. I am in Roanoke making eye contact with strangers on the Highland Park sidewalk. I am in Roanoke saying hello to an unhoused man who grins at me wider than anyone else I see that day. I am in Roanoke tipping the barista at Second. I am in Roanoke walking past the detention center on my way to the open mic at Big Lick Brewery. I am in Roanoke singing to the sycamores on the roadside. I am in Roanoke mincing garlic. I am in Roanoke clinging to active voice over passive voice, trying to always say “When ICE agents fatally shot Alex Pretti” rather than “When Alex Pretti died” or “was killed,” working to expose truth rather than obscure it, heaving with every leg of my syntax to confront rather than exonerate. I am in Roanoke writing poems. Maybe, in April, I’ll be in Roanoke riding the bus, talking to people in transit. Can all these actions be political? I’m beginning to think yes.

In many ways, to pursue civic action is to live in the liminal space between a departure and an arrival. It’s to simultaneously wear a grief for the world’s condition alongside a fierce belief in how it could transform.

I want to be the 2026 Writer by Bus because I believe the people and experience of public transit will teach me this kind of carrying. I want to learn how to live and love between locations. I want to learn how to be bewildered, and still writing, and still dreaming, and still going. To write between worlds, and yet still here, crafting a home for a communal self amidst liminality—the joy of this practice will be my civic action.

During the snowstorm, my neighbor and I walked to CVS to get his prescription, and a man was singing “Zombie” in the parking lot. The next day, a man I’d never met dug out my car with a pickaxe. The squirrels here are secret agents, scaling flimsy tree limbs like grappling hooks. Strangers keep smiling at me in Old Southwest, letting me pet their dogs. After my car broke down, an off-duty VDOT employee stopped and waited for the tow with me because I reminded him of his daughter. The mechanic on Peters Creek Rd didn’t charge me the diagnostic. I wanted to weep at these people’s kindness. The architecture of the Taubman takes my breath away. Downtown buildings burst with murals of women and breath and water and life. Someone was hungry enough to make that happen, hungry enough for a canvas. After Renee Good was killed by an ICE agent, locals lined Jefferson Street; when I drove past, I saw a sign with lines from the poem, “First They Came.” Last week driving to Hollins, I watched someone hanging letters on a bypass that spelled, REJECT TYRANNY. Behind it, the mountains sang—that insistent copper-green-blue gaze, always seeing straight through me, always challenging me to be truer, to bring my body to the world. I want to move towards them always. Roanoke is sopping with kindness and with hunger for a better world. To wander it is to find poetry.