New Poem in Constellation: Ekphrasis

One of my favorite things about living in Vermont is that we have a deep and vibrant literary community here. One of the steward of this community is Literary North, a local literary organization that hosts incredible events and organizes the best calendar of literary happenings in the area. They're a godsend and when they put out a call for works of ekphrasis, I was thrilled to send out "Landfill," a poem I wrote last fall. It was written in Atlanta and inspired by a work in the Hood Museum by an artist I first encountered in New York and the omnipresent global climate crisis. 

At a time when things feel tiny and localized, it was nice to pull this out and be reminded of how vast and interconnected we all are.

New Poem in The Decameron

It's been quite a long time since I checked in here! I've got loads of personal updates (since I last checked in about two years, I've started a new job, taken a class with the brilliant Vievee Francis, and been accepted to my first artists residency), but of course the biggest change for me and all of you and likely everyone around the globe has been the coronavirus pandemic. 

With that in mind, I discovered The Decameron for the first time last week, and I've also been pleased to see a couple modern-day equivalents pop up, including this excellent one, which last week published a poem I wrote back in October, "A Great Pestilence in the Air."

Stay safe out there, friends. We'll all be together again soon.

New Copywriting Piece: A Familiar Face at the Royal Wedding

I'm a big fan of the Royal Family, so it was a lot of fun for me to write this article for the Dartmouth Alumni news site!

Feeling the Love: Building Community through #DartmouthLoveStory - Higher Ed Experts Marketing Memo

I was so excited to be asked to write a Marketing Memo for Higher Ed Experts, a great professional group that offers lots of different types of online courses, conferences, and articles for higher education professionals.

My marketing memo is a case study of one of our most successful social media campaigns, #DartmouthLoveStory. One of my favorite pieces to put together each year, the Love Story interviews dozens of Dartmouth alumni couples. In my marketing memo, I cover how the story and adjacent social media campaign meet my department's mission, and discuss the history and future of the story. I hope you'll give it a read!

Five Important Money Things I’m Glad I Did Right In My 20s - Article on The Financial Diet

It's been a couple years since I last wrote for The Financial Diet, but I'm super pumped to have another post up today, this time about the Five Important Money Things I'm Glad I Did Right in My 20s.

I really love writing about personal finance, and although I spent most of 2016 doing freelance commercial finance writing, it feels good to get back into the softer world of PF blogs. Give the article a read through, and let me know in the comments if you did anything right in your 20s!

New Copywriting Piece: Rachel Dratch Article

Tonight, Dartmouth will be hosting Dartmouth Idol, a musical competition that brings together some of our incredible students. This year is it's 10th anniversary, and because of this, a very special guest, Rachel Dratch '88 of Saturday Night Live fame, will be hosting. I was lucky enough to have the chance to interview her ahead of the show!

You can read the complete article here, and if you're in the mood for a musical treat, you can watch Dartmouth Idol online tonight at 8pm.

New Copywriting Piece: Dartmouth Love Stories

More than almost anything else, I love a good love story. So, you can imagine how excited I was to work on "And the Rest Is History: Dartmouth Love Stories" for the Dartmouth Alumni News website. In the story, I've interviewed more than 20 couples who are both Dartmouth alumni.

Most met at college and got married soon after, but quite a few met after college, too. It was so fun getting to know these incredible couples and having a small peek into their lives (not to mention into some of their wonderful old photos)!

I've had a really great time at this job over the last four months, but this is by far my favorite project I've worked on. I hope you'll hop over and have a read. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

New Copywriting Piece - Dartmouth 30 Under 30

The Forbes 30 Under 30 list is a pretty big deal, and I'm so excited that four of our incredible alumni made the list this year! If you're interested, you can check out my article about the list and our honorees.

New Copywriting Piece - Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing Documentary

It was a lot of fun to work on my latest story, about an incredible group of alumni who worked together on Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing, a new documentary that's available now on HBO. Talking to them about their work, it was clear how passionate they all are about storytelling, and how moving it was to work on this film. I'm very excited for the directors to come to campus in a few months to discuss it after a screening.

You can read the full article below.

New Copywriting Piece - Dartmouth Alumni Website

I suppose now is as good a time as any to announce that I've recently taken a new position as Social Media and Digital Content Manager at Dartmouth College. I'm working in the Alumni Relations department and really loving it. It's been a big change, both in moving from recruitment to alumni work and in moving from New York City to rural New England. It hasn't been without its challenges, but it's also been very exciting, and I'm starting to settle in well.

You can check out some of my social media work on Twitter, Instagram, and our Facebook page, and I'll be posting my web articles here from time to time. My most recent one is below and can also be read online.

The Power of PowerPoint

I'm not sure how old I was, but I think it was likely some time around 1998 that my friend Emily and I convinced our parents to take us to Salem, MA. We achieved this through the power of a new magic: the Internet.

I really had a thing for witches back in the day, probably because of The Craft and probably because witches are AWESOME.* Emily and I must have known about Salem from school, and we used the computer to perform some research on the town, in order to convince our parents that a trip there would be both educational and fun. (Two key things you need for any family vacation, of course.) We took said information, and used Microsoft PowerPoint to put together a presentation for them explaining why they simply had to take us.

Shockingly, it worked! Although neither set of parents went for the "we can all go together!" plan we originally had, our parents took us on separate trips in October that year, and we had a wonderful time. It was my sister's birthday weekend, too (so, it must have been Columbus Day weekend), and we stopped in Boston on our way back. Overall, perhaps one of my most successful uses of PowerPoint to date.

Happy Halloween, folks! Hope you have a spooky, but not too scary, day!

*NB: The following year, I recall using a search engine for the first time, after taking my friends Jackie and Casey to see The Blair Witch project. So convinced were we that it was real that my father said, "It's not real. I can prove it. Let's Ask Jeeves." And we found a site explaining that it wasn't real, despite the whole Sci-Fi Channel mockumentary looking pretty darn real. If I were to write an academic article about my middle school years, it might be titled "Witches and the Internet: Where's the Real Magic?"

New Copywriting Pieces - NYU Quarterly - August 2016

I'm excited to share a few of the pieces I wrote for this quarter's issue of the NYU Quarterly. If you'd like to read anything more clearly, you can click on each piece, or feel free to contact me for a print copy. You can also read more from this issue, Idea Exchange, online.


The NYU Quarterly is an admissions magazine that goes out to high school students interested in applying to the university for college. We reach a wide audience, since there are so many programs available, and so it's been a lot of fun to write on a variety of different topics. You can read my last issue here.

On Vanity

A little nostalgic this week, and remembering the day last month when someone said, "The only thing Kristin likes more than taking photos is having her photo taken," so I wanted to share a bit more about this image of myself.

The party had what felt like a million rooms. This one had a bar with bottles of something ridiculously sweet, and there was a band playing jazz, I think. Everything was drenched in blue. Another was all yellow, and there was a DJ and tropical drinks. We danced a lot, and I wore incredibly uncomfortable silver heels. Was this the first time I ever flirted with a stranger? Probably. He and his friend paid for a cab home for my friend and me. I remember his friend got quite angry at me for some off-color joke I made. Looking back, I certainly shouldn't have made the joke.

The dress I'm wearing is the same one I wore to a dinner-cruise during my eighth grade trip to DC in 1999, which in 2006 felt like an entire lifetime ago. The dress is backless and navy blue and sparkled, and is actually quite lovely. At that dance, a girl in my year wore the most magnificent pink gown covered in little silk rosebuds. She was from Russia, and had been in Welcome to the Dollhouse. She was the first person I knew who wore a thong, which I could see peeking out from her white capris one morning when I sat behind her in history class.

Anyway, I love this photo because once I thought that was going to be my life, that every day would be just like that.

New Copywriting Piece - NYU Search Brochure - Spring 2016

The search piece is a direct mail brochure that serves as a teaser to get high school students thinking about NYU, and hopefully encourages them to sign up for our mailing list. It's one of the largest mailings we send out every year, and it was so fun to interview these three great students and tell just a small part of their story. If you'd like to read anything more clearly, you can click on each piece, or feel free to contact me for a print copy.

New Copywriting Pieces - NYU Quarterly - May 2016

I'm excited to share a few of the pieces I wrote for this quarter's issue of the NYU Quarterly. If you'd like to read anything more clearly, you can click on each piece, or feel free to contact me for a print copy. You can also read more from this issue, The People Issue, online.

The NYU Quarterly is an admissions magazine that goes out to high school students interested in applying to the university for college. We reach a wide audience, since there are so many programs available, and so it's been a lot of fun to write on a variety of different topics. You can read my last issue here.

New Photos on High Snobiety

I was pretty thrilled when a friend texted me this screenshot and said, "Is that Roger?"

It is indeed a photo of my partner, who I've recently been trying to convince to become a male model! I took this photo about a year and a half ago, when Roger was getting his second tattoo.

I just started taking a photography class a few weeks ago, so you can imagine how excited I was to see a few of my older photos featured on the site. Below, you can see the originals, and one that wasn't included of the tattoo itself. If you'd like to see them in their new habitat, visit High Snobiety's list.

Thanks for including us in your feature, High Snobiety!

New Copywriting Pieces - NYU Quarterly - February 2016

I'm excited to share a few of the pieces I wrote for this quarter's issue of the NYU Quarterly. If you'd like to read anything more clearly, you can click on each piece, or feel free to contact me for a print copy.

The NYU Quarterly is an admissions magazine that goes out to high school students interested in applying to the university for college. We reach a wide audience, since there are so many programs available, and so it's been a lot of fun to write on a variety of different topics. You can read my last issue here.

Late Night Conversation - Brian Foo

I had such a great conversation with Brian Foo, web developer and artist at NYPL Labs, a few weeks ago. We talked about oral history, data visualization, and the public domain. NYPL Labs has been working on making public domain documents more available, and has created a few examples for creative ways to remix them. My favorite is probably Navigating the Green Book, which maps itineraries for different routes based on data found in The Green Book, a travel guide for black travelers from the 30s to the 60s.

I found it by clicking around the NYPL Public Domain Visualization, so I feel as if fate has brought me to this podcast a bit, since randomly clicking this one fascinating book out of 187,000 seems really fortuitous. I hope you'll have a listen to our conversation!

Listen here: http://latenightlibrary.org/brian-foo-nypl-labs/

Late Night Conversation - Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

Last month, I was lucky enough to be able to interview poet, essayist, and now MTV columnist Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib about the writing life and his new book, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, out from Button Poetry at AWP next weekend. The book is really great, and if you'll be at AWP, you should definitely stop by their booth and pick up your copy. After asking to interview him about his poetry, I remembered that I'd actually read one of his essays before I knew he was a poet, and so it was really interesting to me to come at his work from both of those angles, and talking to him about it was fantastic. I hope you'll enjoy our conversation as much as I did!

Have a listen here: Hanif Willis Abdurraqib on Late Night Conversation

New Late Night Conversations - Odilia Galván Rodríguez, John Matteson, and Sarah A. Chrisman

This winter, I've had the chance to talk to some fascinating people for Late Night Conversation. I'm very delayed in posting these, but I hope you'll take some time to listen to them now, if you haven't already!

This month, I was able to speak with Odilia Galván Rodríguez about her important new anthology, Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice. We spoke about what makes poetry such a good medium for social change, and the fascinating story of collaboration, technology, and social justice that went into the creation of this book. Listen here.

In January, I spoke with John Matteson, Pulitzer Prize winner and editor of The Annotated Little Women. I've loved Little Women since I was in middle school, and I still practically swoon when I see a clip from the 1994 movie, so it was really wonderful to hear some of the book's backstory and ephemera from an expert on the Alcott family. Listen here.

And in December, I was lucky enough to talk to Sarah A. Chrisman about her newest book, This Victorian Life. Sarah recounts what it’s like to explore nineteenth-century culture and technologies from the inside out, living with her husband as they would have in the 1800s. We spoke about women's rights, outsiders' reactions to her choices, and the nineteenth-century trend she wishes would catch on again. I especially loved hearing her clock in the background, and having her say, "We set our days by its ticking." Listen here.