Maria Giesbrecht and Jennae Cecelia in conversation

In A Little Feral, Maria Giesbrecht delivers a debut collection that navigates faith, family, and personal resurrection through a voice at once wild, intimate, and quietly rebellious. Written in the aftermath of leaving a conservative Mennonite upbringing, these poems chart a parallel journey of breaking away-- from father, from God, from the confines of obedience. Giesbrecht's language is lyrical and unflinching, a cadence that moves between tenderness and defiance, weaving ancestral memory with moments of stark revelation. A Little Feral asks readers to reimagine where holiness might be found-- in the fractures of family, in the undoing of inherited faith, and even in the loneliness of a world shaped by patriarchy and exile.

Maria Giesbrecht is a Canadian poet whose work explores her Mexican and Mennonite roots. Her writing has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Narrative, Grain, ONLY POEMS, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2025 Jack McCarthy Book Prize, the Lesley Strutt Poetry Prize, a finalist for the 2025 Narrative Poetry Prize, a Best of Net nominee, and the founder of Gather, an international writing community that connects poets worldwide. Born in Durango, Mexico, she now lives near Toronto, Canada with her fiancée.

Jennae Cecelia is a best-selling author and poet known for inspiring more than 16 million around the world with her poem, I Met My Younger Self for Coffee.Since 2016, she has published multiple books – the most popular being, Healing for No One But Me and This Is Girlhood. Her current interests as an author are to tell stories around life experiences that in the moment seem insignificant but become nostalgic as time goes on.

Kassandra Vilchis is a poet living in Minnesota, where she writes poems that behave like artifacts and inherited rituals that shape grief, womanhood, and generational memory. Her work was recently short‑listed for the 2026 Central Avenue Poetry Prize and appears in Bending Genres Journal, Rowayat, The Passion Fruit Review, Effemera, and multiple anthologies. Off the page, she can be found with her dog, Thor, and navigating life as someone dramatically lactose intolerant. She shares work on Instagram @kassandra.vilchis and curates notes on Substack @kassandravilchis.

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