I’m super pleased and proud to announce that I have a poetry chapbook collection forthcoming with Kelsay Books: We Have Seen the Corn will be entering production in May 2025, and will be available for purchase soon thereafter (Don’t worry, I will keep you updated!). By the way, the gorgeous graphic above is the illustration my immensely talented and generous daughter, Cameren Harper, created expressly for use as the cover of We Have Seen the Corn, for which I’m inexpressibly grateful!

This little collection has been a long time in the making and most of the individual poems have been previously published (including the title poem, below*), but what I’m most thrilled about is this opportunity to amass and share with you all these words of grief, growth, joy, and celebration into one beautiful entity dedicated to my husband, inspiration, love of my life, brilliant poet, and most extraordinary (and freaking adorable!) of human beings, the one and only, inimitable Robert Okaji (idk, you may’ve heard of him…).

I’ve been sitting on this news for quite a while, but I’ve decided that there couldn’t be a better time to make such an announcement than during our revered National Poetry Month, so the cat is officially clawing her way out of the bag!

Thank you so much for sharing this poetic moment with me! And stay tuned for more info as it comes available!

*We Have Seen the Corn

with twelve-hundred miles
of fields in our wake

I am aching
to slip among those stalks & touch

their silk-topped ears all conspiring
skyward now

to beguile the birds’ cries from the brim
of that thundercloud

burgeoning
over the Nebraska plain

let’s pull off the interstate     so we can
stretch our legs for a bit

Indiana will wait

split those crows’ itinerant
congregation     there     & park

right alongside the unending green
I want to enter

its late-sun-streams sifting the sky motes
crimson-gold     & stirring

the cicadas’ whirrs & earwigs’ scuttles in the loam
to a viscous chorus

& with my hand clasped in yours     press
another lush measure

into our song’s sweet & sultry folds

~STEPHANIE L. HARPER