“When my heart fills up and I can’t hold something in there anymore, I write,” Kai Coggin says in an interview with Billy Lezra for Rough Cut Press. “When my heart breaks for some cruel injustice, I write. When my heart longs, I write. When my heart is bursting with love or sex or joy or transcendence, I write. . . . I make myself an instrument of the cosmos, letting energy move through me into poetic form. I transcribe the human experience, the humble path of the seeker, the pitfalls and the triggers, the defeats and victories of attaining self-awareness.”
As a K-12 English teacher, Coggin was deeply concerned with helping students see poetry as a “safe place” where they could connect with others, be themselves, and just experience joy.
Her own work mirrors those concerns, as this excerpt from “Filling Spice Jars as Your Wife” shows:
We have all our doors and windows open
and I am pouring spices into glass jars,
coriander cinnamon cumin ground sage
and it’s hard to describe this
moment in the confines of a page,
tiny hills of vibrant color
and intoxicating fragrance
and you hear the cadence
of my heart
from the kitchen
where you build the perfect fitting slip-in shelves
for our spices over the stove,
match the colors,
match my colors to yours,
I have all my doors and windows open to you.
Poetry by the Sea is delighted to welcome Kai Coggin as Jon Tribble Editors Fellow for 2026. As a Fellow, Coggin will participate in a panel, read her work, and generally be available all week for the stimulating poet-to-poet conversations that the Conference is so well known for. Register on the website.