Mid/South Contributors: Todd Osborne
Learn more about one of our poets
I first found Todd Osborne on Scrawl Place and have been drawn to his voice ever since. He kindly shared some work for our first anthology, and now we’ll also be publishing his debut poetry collection, Gatherer, next year. Read on to learn more about Todd and join us tonight to hear him read with some of our other Mid/South Anthology contributors!
Name: Todd Osborne
Current Location: Hattiesburg, MS
Links: @tadasborne on Twitter and Instagram
Bio: Todd Osborne is a poet and teacher originally from Nashville, TN. His poetry has previously appeared at Redactions, Nat. Brut., Tar River Poetry, EcoTheo Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. He is a poetry reader for Memorious and a feedback editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal. He lives and writes in Hattiesburg, MS, with his wife and their cats.
1. Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your work that will appear in the anthology?
For the most part, the poems speak for themselves I think, but I will let you know that I truly am bad with cardinal directions, to the point that the original draft of “Belief-Making” had the wrong directions in them, geographically speaking. I simply could not tell you which way is north.
2. How would you describe your work overall? Do you have other publications you’d like us to highlight?
My work tends to be very internal. I have rarely found a way to write about something outside myself, but I am trying to get better at that. One of my main hobbyhorses is the idea that the world is a story, a narrative, that we tell ourselves about it. History is as constructed as anything else. As a man growing up in the South, that feels especially important: the idea that I do not have to re-create the mistakes of the past just because they are the past.
I had a poem in Scrawl Place recently about my hometown, Nashville, that I am especially proud of, and another at EcoTheo Review that I would love to shout out!
3. How does the Mid-South and/or larger Southern region influence your perspective (personally and/or in your writing)?
I have lived in the Mid-South my entire life, so it is suffused in every aspect of who I am. Whether it is the hustle and bustle of growing up in a city like Nashville, the expansiveness of Oklahoma, or the heat-and-humidity of southern Mississippi, all of these different aspects of this area (and more!) come together in my writing.
4. What do you wish more people knew about this area?
It feels perhaps a little like a cliché at this point, but there is a lot more going on here than people think. All kinds of people live here and enjoy living here!
