New Twitter Editor Joins the Broadsided Team
It’s been such a pleasure to be the Twitter editor for Broadsided the last five years. In addition to being the first journal to ever take a chance on my work as a poet, Broadsided is also the first journal that got me thinking deeply and creatively about the ways literature and the world can interact. Sharing the monthly collaborations on Twitter felt like a digital version of the sort of work Broadsided vectors do out in the streets: posting thought-provoking art and language where it can delight, inspire, and provoke those who stumble upon it. I’m excited to focus on some personal creative projects in the new year—The Poet Salon podcast! Illustrated interviews! A poetry collection!—and as I do, I’ll definitely be applying lessons I’ve learned from the Broadsided family about literary citizenship and the beauty of collaboration.
Broadsided is the source of some of the most authentic collaborations I’ve ever seen. In combining art and words in one easily accessible format, Broadsided has been reinventing the one-sheet with every publication to inspire and touch those who lack creativity and poetry in their everyday lives. Vectorizing is more than just posting broadsides out in the world; and posting on the Broadsided twitter page is more than crafting daily tweets. It is the way I can help the press reach a new audience with every stroke of brush/pen, piece of tape, and retweet.
We hope you’ll follow (if you’re into the bird-speak) and give Salena a warm welcome! We are so grateful for all she and the other Broadsided staff do to support our writers, our artists, and our mission of helping readers get literature and art onto the streets of their communities.
Gabrielle (Gabby) Bates, Official Voice of Broadsided Press on Twitter (2014 – 2019), is a writer and visual artist from Birmingham, Alabama. Currently, she lives in Seattle, where she works at Open Books: A Poem Emporium and serves on the editorial board of the Seattle Review and Poetry Northwest. Her work appears in Poetry, the New England Review, the Missouri Review, Washington Square, Best of the Net 2015, the Adroit Journal, and Guernica, among other journals. She is the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Hugo House, and the University of Washington, where she completed her MFA. Gabby joined Broadsided’s editorial team in 2014. Find her at www.gabriellebat.es or on twitter: @GabrielleBates.
Salena Deane, Twitter Editor and Vector-at-Large, is an emerging writer and performer based of Brockton, Massachusetts. When she’s not writing poetry or practicing her meditation skills, she can be found tearing it up on stage at Club Ego in downtown Providence, RI. Her dream place to vectorize would be every Dunkin’ in the U.S.; she just started a job at the corporate office and hopes to make her way into their social media/marketing department someday. Salena joined Broadsided’s editorial team in 2019.