S T A F F

Maya Marshall, Founder 
{ www.mayamarshallpoetry.com }       

Marty McConnell, Founder 
{ www.martyoutloud.com }

The underneath is as valuable as the seen, and sometimes more so. At underbelly, our goal is to bring to the surface what we often strive to make invisible: the joyful, arduous, miraculous, by turns tender and brutal process of shepherding a poem from its primal state to its final state.

As poetry educators and consumers, we love and admire the poem in its published form, and frequently hunger to know how it came to be. In workshops and classrooms, we analyze the end product, often hazarding guesses about how a poem began or what forms it may have taken along the way.

Our clear hope here is to lift the veil, to undo the notion that poems always or even usually arrive perfect and whole from the genius mind of the writer. To reassure ourselves and others who seek to improve their craft or understanding that the magic of writing and revision is a practical magic -- one that can be taught, practiced, and hopefully maybe possibly even someday mastered.