Cathleen Chambless is from Miami, Florida. She graduated with her MFA in poetry from FIU. She is also a visual artist and activist. She facilitates popular education based anti-oppression workshops with Miami’s grassroots organization Seed 305. Her work has appeared in MPC’s 10 Cent Journal, the anthology A Touch of Saccharine, Kind of a Hurricane Press’s Best of 2014 Anthology, The Electronic Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature, Jai-Alai, The Mind[Less] Muse, and she was a poetry finalist for the Bellingham Review’s 2014 Parallel Award for poetry. She co-authors a queer/feminist zine called Phallacies.
Witchy, incantatory and viper smart, Nec(Romantic) is part black magic, part madcap Mother Goose, part postfeminist manifesto. Cathleen Chambless writes poems for real people living in a real world full of real problems– like grief and addiction, love and heartbreak. Not for blockheads or poetasters, this is a knock-your-socks-off collection of poetry. –Campbell McGrath
Cathleen Chambless is a fearless riot grrrl poet whose witchy and bewitching poems cast their spell. Her debut Nec(Romantic) is full of love and death, politics and our fragile natural world. Chambless uses the rhythms of nursery rhymes as well as traditional forms to tip over the toy box of childhood, storm through addiction, and wrestle the elegiac mode. Nec(Romantic) is a book so real it stings.
–Denise Duhamel, Blowout (University of Pittsburgh, 2013)
Nec(Romantic) was a finalist in the Bi-Sexual Book Award in Poetry (more info about The Bi Writers Association)