About Laura Isabela Amsel
author of
A Brief Campaign of sting and sweet
Laura Isabela Amsel was born in the Mississippi Delta and now lives in Madison, Mississippi. She holds an MA in Spanish from Middlebury College. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Terrain, Another Chicago Magazine, Cloudbank, Common Ground Review, wildness, Nimrod International Journal, Harbor Review, and Atlanta Review. Her poem “Father” won the 2022 Monica Taylor Poetry Prize, judged by Airini Beautrais, and her poem “Cain” won the 2022 Mikrokosmos Poetry Prize, judged by A.E. Stallings. A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet won the Brick Road Poetry Prize and is her first book of poetry.
Of her work Laura says, “By the time I came to poetry in 2016 after a breast cancer diagnosis, my study of the Spanish language had already awakened in me a love of the sounds of words, of how they feel in your mouth when spoken aloud, and of the nuances of meaning that change and grow richer over time. Words also afforded me the power to manage the unmanageable, to reimagine endings, to make of the chaotic and the ugly beautiful arrangements. A mother of four children, I have come to think that a poem is like a child–a willful, uncontrollable creature that needs to assert its independence to become what it is meant to become. The best poems are the ones the poet cannot quite control, the ones that insist on becoming themselves.”