Update on 2024 graduate Bri Gonzalez
Even though Bri only graduated a year ago, they are up to a ton of amazing things! In the same year as their MFA thesis defense, they also published their debut book of poetry, A Wellness Check:Ìý
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There, in the night sky, projected over city smog and ghost stars—the Rat Signal. Followed by the rev of the Ratmobile’s custom made engine and the inevitable slam of Asylum doors. Bri Gonzalez’s debut collection, A Wellness Check, follows a recently diagnosed speaker under the care of Dr. Ratman—part-time psychologist, part-time vigilante—who ratarangs his patients into submission. Through an amalgamation of hybrid prose, poetry, screenplays, and fragment essays, A Wellness Check jabs at pop culture's use of mental illness as shock value. Here, the joys and pains of clinical illness are interwoven with rat fists, diner coffee, crossword puzzles, plot twists, divinity, and the looming shadows of heroes that want us dead, or worse.
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Copies of A Wellness Check can be ordered here:ÌýÌý
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Bri Gonzalez is a queer, Chicane poet from San Antonio, Texas. More of Bri’s work can be found or forthcoming in Honey Literary, Crow & Cross Keys, Angel Rust, Talon Review, ERGI Press’ Trickster: An Anthology of Queer Mischief, Devil’s Party Press’ Solstice: A Winter Anthology, and others. Bri is a graduate of the Summer ‘23 Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and will receive their MFA in Creative Writing from the ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ in Spring 2024. In their free time, they smother their void cat, Dahlia, play excessive amounts of D&D, and swoon over fictional characters. Bri currently teaches at Front Range Community College and is (somehow) editing the behemoth that is their in-progress novel. Check Bri out at .Ìý