Andrea Rogers won the Agnes Scott Writer’s Festival Poetry Prize in 2015. She is currently a Ph.D. Poetry student at Georgia State University, where she is an Advanced Teaching Fellow. Rogers is currently a writing instructor at GSU and Agnes Scott College, and works as a Writing Consultant at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. Outside of teaching and tutoring, she has also worked for literary journals (Five Points, Odradek) and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, POET SOUNDS (Lo-fi Poetry Series Anthology covering the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds), Exit 271: Your Georgia Writers Resource, Negative Capability Press’s Georgia Poetry Anthology, Stone, River, Sky, Red Paint Hill’s Mother is a Verb Anthology, and Treehouse; her nonfiction and interviews appear in Boog City, Treehouse, and The 11th Hour.Interviewer: What made you enter the Writers’ Festival?
Andrea Rogers: I decided to enter the Writers’ Festival because of its prestigious reputation, and also because of the calibre of the visiting writers last year (Tracy K. Smith, Chris Abani).
What is the most difficult part of the writing process for you?
The most difficult part of the writing process for me is sitting down and doing it. I always have ideas — I save them in my phone and in a thousand notebooks. Sitting down to write is always rewarding, but for whatever reason, I always put it off as long as I can. Maybe it’s because I want to delay the emotional “vein-opening” that happens when we write poetry, or maybe it’s because I am and have always been a procrastinator.
What is your favorite part about writing?
My favorite part about writing is being engaged in the creative act, which creates a feeling unlike any other. I also enjoy collaborating with others — I recently wrote a chapbook with my friend and ASC alumna Paige Sullivan, and am currently working on another with my friend Simona Chitescu Weik. Collaboration forces you to meet deadlines and gives you an “accountability partner”, so to speak, which helps me with the most difficult part of the writing process (sitting down and doing it).
What advice do you have for anybody that is interested in writing or publications?
My advice for students who want to write and publish is to read as much as you possibly can. Subscribe to email newsletters and follow publications online if you’re not into carrying around hard copies. You can’t expect to know what you like, much less what you want to do, if you don’t have a broad view of what came before and what is going on around you. And don’t be afraid to submit. Submissions are rejected much more often than they are accepted; don’t let this discourage you. Sometimes it takes a long time for a poem or story to find its “home” — and when it does, what a wonderful feeling that will be.
What are you doing now or what are you working on?
I am currently an adjunct professor at Agnes Scott and an instructor at Georgia State University, and work in the Business Writing Center at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. I am finishing my dissertation at the moment and planning to submit my poetry manuscript in the near future. I’m also working on the chapbook I mentioned above, which is about patron saints (both real and imaginary). And, as always, I’m trying to find the time to make myself sit down and write.
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