While there are so many amazing poems in our “In the Questions” poetry collection, one piece that always stands out is Darkness by Melissa Algood. Seeing as she has a new YA book out, we thought we’d take today’s blog post to feature this poem and focus on this award-winning author’s works.

Without further adieu… Darkness.

Darkness by Melissa Algood from “In the Questions”

She bottles up her beauty in glass jars.

That never see the sun nor moon,

Only the endless unlit sky.

Her young figure fades,

Her eyes lose their shine.

After years her bottled-up beauty seeped out

Through the lids that loosened over time.

She will never see the sun nor moon

In the darkness.

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On Melissa’s blog site, there’s a twenty questions article about her. While we don’t have the time or space to recap the whole article, we did want to share a few of our favorites with you. When you get a chance, pop over and read the rest of the Q&A, it’s hilarious, educational, and inspiring.

“Name four authors that you’d love to have lunch with.  Richard Adams, Matt Ruff, Nicola Yoon, and Courtney Summers.”

“What would you eat? Probably not rabbit…I’m picturing a sleep over environment which includes pizza and sodas.”

“How do you plot out your work? I usually don’t.  I get a scene in my head, and I’ll play it over and over again until it is as clear as an Oscar winning film and then I write it.  Although this often causes a lot of work once I’m ‘done’ with the first draft so from now on I really need to do an outline first (but I did do that for ‘The Bakery Assistant’ which I have yet to complete and I lost the outline).”

“What’s your best fan story? When I sold an anthology to a teenage girl at a Comic Con in Houston and she shared with me her journal of poetry that she carries with her, then later that day came by to told me how much she loved my story.  Or when I read my piece ‘Thomas’ at the Spider Road Press award ceremony and one of my friends told me that it was the only piece that made her cry.”

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Everything That Counts is Algood’s latest book to be published. The back blurb reads “Blake Morgan is the biggest geek in all the graduating class of 2005, possibly in all of Annapolis, maybe even the entire world.  He decides that talking to a girl, doing something unexpected, getting an F, and performing a brave act during his senior year will make him into a whole other person.  Maybe even cool. Yet when he checks something off the list he hurts the few people who love him just the way he is.  A loser.  Is he able to repair the damage?  Is changing who you are worth it?  Can Blake be an astrophysicist and have a supermodel as a girlfriend? Blake Morgan is stupid enough to wreck his life, but is he smart enough to put it back together?”

Check out Algood’s website, Amazon Author Page, and order your copies of Everything That Counts and In The Questions for your bookshelf today. And don’t miss the “Everything That Counts” release party on August 24th in Houston, TX!

This post was written by SRP Blog Editor, Jody T. Morse. To learn more about Spider Road Press and see our whole catalog of books, visit our website. Thanks for reading and for supporting small presses and female-identifying writers!