Michigan Notable Author and Poet Brittany Rogers was riddled with doubts about her first poetry manuscript. During edits, she dropped all the poems on the pages until she had only four left. Then she deleted those, too. When a professor took a look at the finally finished manuscript, he told Rogers: “Print and submit. NOW.” Rogers is a poet, visual artist, essayist, high school teacher, and lifelong Detroiter. Her new collection is titled, Good Dress (Tin House Press, 2025).
“I realized way too late, maybe four years or so into turning a chapbook into a full-length manuscript,” Rogers says. “I wasn’t interested in what I was writing about anymore … It was a lot of poems about motherhood and my role as a parent, my relationship to my children, which I value, of course. But then, when I looked at the collection, it felt like it was about someone not me—or wasn’t me anymore.”
Tossing out poems, Rogers finally realized she was writing an entirely new collection. Good Dress became a kind of love letter to her hometown of Detroit, to Black womanhood and community, to libraries.
“For a long time, libraries were where I spent most of my time outside of my house,” Rogers says. “As I was working towards this collection, thinking about what I was invested in writing about and invested in archiving, I just realized how much I learned about myself through the libraries. I solidified my queerness through my library selections. The library is where I grew up.”
Brittany Rogers is a fellow of VONA, The Watering Hole, Poetry Incubator, and Pink Door Writing Retreat. She is editor-in-chief of Muzzle magazine and co-host of VS Podcast and teaches English in Detroit Public Schools. Rogers will read at Richland Community Library in Richland at 6 p.m. on June 17.
Listen to WMUK's Art Beat every Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 4:20 p.m.
