Emma Galloway Stephens: No Billboard Gospel in Conversation w/ Rick Mulkey

No Billboard Gospel is a book of poems for every reader who has ever asked the question, "If God exists and if he is good, then how can he permit evil?" Its poems follow its speaker on a thorny red clay path through a season of severe doubt. Its Southern landscape of rivers, bogs, mountaintops, and kudzu-choked forests provides a gothic backdrop for her spiritual quest driven by an insatiable "Godhunger." The language of drought and storms reflect the all-consuming nature of following God. The speaker desires to drown in God, to crawl hand over fist toward him, hungry for truth and transformation. But even as the speaker reaches toward the Divine, anger holds her back: anger at the world's growing darkness, the crumbling of its once-trustworthy institutions, and its commodification of faith. No Billboard Gospel yearns for restoration: of personal faith, of community, and of the broken-but-still-beautiful world.

Emma Galloway Stephens is a poet, professor, and a peculiar pilgrim. Raised in the Appalachian foothills of north Greenville County, South Carolina, her poems pour from a native landscape of red clay and cicada summers. Her parents, both educators themselves, reared her on poetry, classic literature, ghost stories, the Bible, and Shakespeare, all of which inform the foundation of her work. Her poems play within the known and unknown, the spiritual and the tangible, and explore the beauty, terror, and mystery of what Flannery O’Connor called the “Christ-haunted” American south.

Emma has taught English and creative writing courses on a university level since 2017. She earned her MFA from Converse University in 2023. In addition to teaching and writing, she performs annually with the Greenville Shakespeare Company. She is a co-founder of Arbor Institute for the Arts in Greenville, SC, where she serves as the Director of Education. She shares her life with her husband and their small menagerie of cats and reptiles.

Rick Mulkey is the author of eight collections, including All These Hungers, Ravenous: New & Selected Poems, Toward Any Darkness, Before the Age of Reason, Bluefield Breakdown, and forthcoming in 2027, Clearing Out the Tillage Rows, and Elegy and Everything After. Individual poems and essays have appeared widely, including Poetry East, Georgia Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Shenandoah, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and the anthologies American Poetry: the Next Generation, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volumes I and II, among others. With Denise Duhamel he co-edited the anthology Ice On a Hot Stove: A Decade of Converse MFA Poetry. His awards include the Hawthornden Fellowship, the Charles Angoff Award, and the Gearhart Poetry Prize. Mulkey is founding director of the Converse Low Residency MFA, and current director of the Converse BFA in Creative Writing.

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