I started following Leah Callen on Twitter recently, and I adore her. You can follow her here: twitter.com/LeahJCallen?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

She is working on her poetry manuscript and I am looking forward to reading her work.

Leah Callen is a poet and dramatist with her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, British Columbia where she studied poetry, playwriting, and screenwriting. Her one-act play The Daughter of Turpentine came to the Victoria Fringe Theatre Festival in 2015, and she was a part-time theatre critic on the island. Her poetry has appeared in The Malahat Review, Vallum Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, Contemporary Verse 2, Scrivener Creative Review, and Barren Magazine where she was a poetry contributing editor. Her words can also be found in a Twin Peaks anthology: These Poems Are Not What They Seem. Leah was longlisted for the 2018 Vallum Award for Poetry and the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize. She has always loved the sea, but after falling hard for the prairies at a Sage Hill Writing retreat, Leah now calls Regina home. And she belongs to the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild.

This is the blurb she wrote for Love & Metaxa:

 “In Love & Metaxa, Strigas confesses the intimate minutes of a flammable girl growing up in a Greek family, and her life beyond in Montreal. It’s a nostalgic, heady blend of logic and magic, love and eros, the living and the dead, all poured out for us in emotive “gold shots.” It’s the story of painful almosts where you’re both fine and not fine at all. Sensual memories flicker for the reader like film vignettes glowing in the amber wash of Metaxa. Honeysuckle and kitchen spices bouquet these poems, but also the slow burn of something darker. Carnal secrets pound into cutting boards and hotel beds. Above all, the poet sings about the binding and unbinding of relationships – the ones that are quick and the ones that haunt us. Love & Metaxa shares a poignant desire to “get to the bottom of love.”

—Leah Callen, poet