Help us welcome G. Gazelka

Sharing from their newly published book of poetry, Tender One.

G. Gazelka has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and is English faculty at North Hennepin Community College and Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota. Tender One is their debut chapbook. In 2022 and 2023, their poems and full-length manuscript Bodies in Transition received honorable mentions from the League of Minnesota Poets in the Trans and NonBinary Award, Keith Gann LGBT Award, and John Rezmerski Memorial Manuscript Competition. Their poems have recently appeared in Avalon Anthology and Rockvale Review.

While many of these poems no longer appear online, the poems in Tender One were originally written on a vintage Smith-Corona typewriter and posted to Instagram in 2015-2016. A few of these poems were given as gifts or staged as art pieces in and around coffee shops (sometimes with permission). They deal with themes of love, spirituality, and awakening.

G. Gazelka, if anything, is a writer and makes no claims to be an expert on religion. Their poetry is influenced by late modernist poet Elizabeth Bishop and beatnik writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Their online tradition acknowledges contemporary poets Tyler Knott Gregson, Christopher Poindexter, JETO and the Streetniks, T.J. McGowan, Romlynn Ramos, and Isra Al-Thibeh.