Several years ago, the poet who sexually assaulted me circulated a letter about me within the poetry community. In it, he made defamatory statements about me, including stating that I was expelled from my MFA program for behavioral health issues. That’s not the case. I withdrew after my first semester of study. It was too difficult to continue there because the sexual assault happened en route to that program’s first residency, the poet who assaulted me was friends with instructors there, and the director lowered my grade for the residency, calling into question my commitment to poetry.

That letter was terrifying. I’d just been diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening disease that affects my immune system. I had thyrotoxicosis, which is also a serious medical condition. And I had follicular thyroid cancer. The letter was circulating among poets when I was too ill to defend myself. It was me against everyone who adored him and believed him and had already been online making statements about victims being spineless or taking pleasure in our own pain. The poet who assaulted me successfully silenced me by lying about me, intimidating me, publicly shaming me, and using my trauma history against me, one he knew well and used as a way to connect with me and earn my trust.

It was too much for me to withstand, so I stopped writing and buried most of myself to salvage whatever remnants I could in an effort to create some kind of life outside poetry. Birding helped me get through it. Weaving helped, too. But when I had a suite of serious medical issues in 2022 followed by serious mental-health issues in 2023, I knew I needed words again. I needed poetry, so I started writing, and I slowly began to connect and reconnect with other poets, even knowing that doing so could lead me back into pain, into misunderstandings, into being labeled and shunned, into being formally and informally blacklisted and, perhaps, right into the arms of cruelty.

If anyone has any concerns or hears any murmurings about me, I hope they’ll talk to me directly and not make assumptions about me based on defamatory, inaccurate, incomplete, or decontextualized information. I’m terrified all over again because my work is appearing in literary journals, and I’m bracing for attacks. That’s why I’m writing this: not to set any record straight, but rather to make my fear transparent, as well as my genuine desire to respond to anything folks may have heard about me.