Jamie Kitts
Biography
Jamie Kitts (she/her) is an author and PhD Candidate based in Ekpahak on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik People. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of Gridlock Lit, Managing Editor and Homerow Chapbook Series Editor of Qwerty Magazine, and the Vice President of The Brunswickan. Her poetry has appeared in Plenitude, Yolk, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She is a co-author of the chapbook All Things to Keep You Here by Egg Poets (Qwerty Homerow 2023), and the author of two solo chapbooks, Girl Dinner (Emergency Flash Mob Press 2024) and Get to a Safe State (Anstruther Press 2026). She writes mainly for trans women but it's cool that other people seem to like her poems, too. Girl Dinner was named one of 2024's best poetry collections by The Miramichi Reader.
Micro-interview
Kind of! My grandmother's favourite poet was Robert Frost, whose poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is important to the young adult novel The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. I loved that book back then, and I even stole one of my dad's old leather jackets to dress up as a Greaser for Halloween. My love of poetry didn't emerge until my late 20s, but poetry would often show up for me like that when I was younger--as a distant beckon in another text calling out like a Weird Route I hadn't seen.
I sort of fell into writing poetry by accident. I'd trained mostly as a prose writer during my undergrad. I had submitted what I thought of as a flash fiction piece to a festival zine back in 2020. The editor texted me to ask if he could include my poem in the zine, and I was like, What poem? Turns out my piece "Are Cookies Still Cookies Without Milk or Eggs?" was a poem! So I thought, if I could write a poem by accident, what if I tried to write a poem on purpose? Lucky(?) for me, COVID lockdowns meant a lot of downtime to play with style and technique. I didn't start to see myself as a poet until a poem I'd written during this period, "Queerplatonic Loaf," showed up in Qwerty #43.
The dedicated assembly of context.
My poem "WE ALL KNOW" started as a yell. Probably my greatest artistic influence is the late poet RM Vaughan. Shortly before his death he edited a book called Marsh Blue Violet: A Queer New Brunswick Anthology. There's a two-sentence, one-line paragraph near the end: "Just don't mess with us. We all know how to start fires." The second I read these words for the first time, I felt myself shouting them in my apartment before I could consciously register what I was doing. It was a truly electric feeling. That outburst unlocked all the fear I was carrying at the time about the declining state of trans and queer rights around the world. So I wrote this poem to try to find and capture that roar again. I've read this poem at festivals and protests, and I've even gotten an audience to shout the end of it with me.