The 40 But 10: Stevie Edwards

 

I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!

Today we are joined by Dr. Stevie Edwards. She is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University and Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Quiet Armor (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). Her next book, The Weather Inside, is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press in Spring 2026 as part of the Miller Williams Poetry Series edited by Patricia Smith. She holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Cornell University. Originally a Michigander, she now lives in South Carolina with her spouse and a small herd of rescue pitbulls.

What made you start writing?

I started writing as a teenager. In the eighth grade, I had a wonderful English teacher (Mr. Janson), and he had us put together a collection of our favorite published poems and then write poems in conversation with those poems. I believe we were also supposed to choose a theme and got to decorate it. As a teen, I had severe issues with generalized anxiety disorder and bipolar I disorder, but they weren’t diagnosed or treated yet, and poetry gave me a place to put my big, disorderly feelings and try to make sense of them.

If you could have a superpower, what would it be?

Definitely teleportation. I have a phobia of driving, and teleportation would be badass. Also, I like to travel, but I don’t love waiting in long security lines at airports or sitting in cramped seats on long flights, so teleportation would be super nice.

What’s the best money you’ve ever spent as a writer?

This year for Christmas, I got a Freewrite Smart Typewriter, and it is magical. It allows me to write without the distraction of a web browser or Outlook telling me I have a new work email to respond to. Also, it feels really nice to type on and is a very appealing aesthetic object. Every time I write now, I feel fancy! And, you know what, if there’s one aspect of my life where I get to feel fancy, I am glad it’s writing.

How do you celebrate when you finish writing a new book?

For my last book, Quiet Armor, I got a tattoo of Medusa on my upper arm because I had three poems in it about Medusa. I’d like to continue the book tattoo tradition, but I don’t know what to get for The Weather Inside yet. If anyone reads the book and has a good tattoo idea, please tell me.

What is your favorite way to waste time?

I’m obsessed with watching cooking competition shows. Top Chef, The Great British Baking Show, Beat Bobby Flay—I love them all. I find them very soothing to watch.

What is your favorite book from childhood?

I must have checked out The Lorax by Dr. Seuss dozens of times from my small local library when I was a kid. I honestly think it shaped my sense of morality and encouraged me to become an environmentalist.

You have to choose an animal or cartoon character that best represents you. Which is it and why?

Absolutely my pitbull Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell had a hard past before we adopted her (we suspect she was abused), and despite her trauma living on in her (as seen by her cowering anytime someone raises their voice), she is full of love. She inspires me to be open to the world despite living through sexual trauma in my teens and twenties. I think it’s easy to want to cut yourself off from the world when terrible things happen to you, but Tinkerbell has taught me to still seek the good in people. Also, just in case you’re wondering, Tinkerbell is a stubby gray pitbull with a genetic condition that makes her legs short. She waddles around and begs for pets from everyone. She’s probably eleven or twelve years old (it’s hard to say because she was found super pregnant in a field), but I hope she’s still got a few more good years in her.

Do you read the reviews of your books or do you stay far far away from them, and why?

I try very hard to only read them once, quickly. I treat them like band-aids; it’s best to rip them off fast. I tend to obsess over the little morsels of criticism, even if the reviews are positive overall. I understand people who just stay far away from reviews (maybe that’s healthier), but at the end of the day, I’m just too curious.

Do you think you’d live long in a zombie apocalypse?

No, I think I would die very quickly. I am terrible at navigation and driving. I’m not good at building things. I’ve never really been in a physical fight and have no interest in learning to use a gun. I hate running. I would be one of the first to go, and honestly, I’m okay with that.

What’s the one thing you wish you knew when you were younger?

I wasn’t diagnosed with mental health issues until I was a senior in college, and I really wish I’d gotten care when I was much younger. I started experiencing severe anxiety and suicidal ideation as an elementary school student, and I just felt incredibly alone and hopeless. I suffered for years that I didn’t need to suffer. Mental health treatment has completely changed my outlook on life.

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March 2026

https://www.uapress.com/product/the-weather-inside/

In The Weather Inside, Stevie Edwards measures the emotional atmosphere of a mind navigating bipolar disorder, complex PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, and alcoholism while forging intimacy and creative resilience in a rapidly declining world.

 Both as someone who has struggled with mental health and as a feminist approaching middle age, Edwards interrogates parenthood and marriage: What forms of nurturing survive when traditional roles and certainties do not? Can bringing children into a collapsing world still be an act of hope? When your partner does not want children, where should you divert your surfeit of love? The poet grieves, “I am chanting the name of a daughter / my husband doesn’t want / enough, the child I’ve spent years / not being sure I deserved.”

 This fiercely honest and intimate collection offers a vision of adulthood shaped by the capacity to inhabit an embattled inner world. With clarity and dark wit, Edwards probes the uneasy border between solitude and connection, asserting the relationship between caring for oneself and caring for the wider world.

 

Advance praise for the book

“ ‘I kept you / long past your prime: sweet / funk of rotting stems and all, / I adored you,’ Edwards might as well be saying to her past self in The Weather Inside. This wholehearted collection featuring a middle-aged speaker reflecting on the young woman she once was is rife with funny, hearty, sensual poems of willful acceptance in sobriety and committed childlessness. Edwards’s is a poetry of insistence. I admire the self-acceptance rendered in the fresh images she’s created.”

—Maya Marshall, author of All the Blood Involved in Love

“The Weather Inside is a beautiful and incisive collection. I love how patient the poems of Stevie Edwards are, how closely they attend to image and the unfolding of the heart. This book is teeming with moments that function as mirrors."

—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“Edwards’s poignant newest collection challenges us to believe it’s possible to feel at home in a body, to feel at home in a life. Sweeping across decades spent ‘trying to be / the pink spray of glitter bursting / from inside the popped balloon,’ these radiant, finely tuned poems examine years mired in major trauma, mental illness, and alcoholism, offering hard-won wisdom at deeply satisfying poetic turns. Fiercely committed to authenticity, Edwards disarms our inner cynics into rooting for love—especially self-love—however tenuous, however incongruous with the hells we’ve lived through.”

—Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca