My name is Emily.
I was born and raised in a small village in rural/rust belt Ohio. I come from a long line of working people–oil drillers, subsistence farmers, factory workers, and small business owners. My parents, who worked in a rubber factory when I was growing up, wanted better opportunities for themselves and their children. They earned associates degrees, entered into new professions, and moved our family to Virginia when I was 12.
In Virginia, I had access to better school libraries and discovered poetry for the first time. Throughout my teenage years, literature became the center of my life and I was determined to get a Ph.D. in literature. The next 15 or so years of my life became dedicated to that end. Upon graduating high school, I attended Piedmont Virginia Community College for two years and finished my undergraduate education in English at the University of Virginia.
In September of 2009, I entered the English Language and Literature program at the University of Michigan. While my experience in the program was positive, in the spring of 2014 I came to the conclusion that I was actually interested in my dissertation, not an academic career. I finished my degree and pivoted to a life that’s less prestigious, more quotidian, and almost certainly more financially stable—full of hand-made things, self-made poems, cats, lovers, queerness, woo-woo, persistent fatigue, plant medicine, weights and swords, tarot cards, genealogy and etymology. In 2019 I became a certified facilitator of The Work That Reconnects, I’m working toward publishing my first book of poems, I’ll read your cards if you ask, and I’m looking for the best way to be of service with the skills and talents I have in this world that has been grievously damaged partly for the sake of people who look like me.
Emily N. Howard 