Prose Reader + Publicity Liaison

Kayla Hassett is a writer and recent graduate of Skidmore College, where she received her B.A. in English with a concentration in Poetry Writing and a minor in Art History. Her senior poetry capstone, You Sound Just Like Your Mother!, received departmental honors and earned her the Frances Steloff Poetry Prize in 2025. Exploring themes of memory, lineage, and budding selfhood, her first manuscript considers the ways language itself acts as form, favoring lush imagery and meditative lines. Her poetic voice has been described by Academy of American Poets prize-winner Matthew Gellman as “remarkably vivid and lucid as she gazes out at the world… so that we may come away enlivened, reminded of the power of intimacy.”

During her undergraduate years, Kayla studied closely with poet April Bernard, whom she credits with shaping her rigor and discipline as a writer. In 2025, she was a resident at the New York State Summer Writers Institute, working with Rosanna Warren, Campbell McGrath, and Henri Cole.
She first encountered a passion for modernism with Through the Looking Glass: A Reflection in high school, later deepening her engagement while studying in Bath, UK, where she thoroughly explored Virginia Woolf’s discography. In her final year at Skidmore, she was introduced to James Joyce’s Ulysses and fell in love with Molly Bloom’s “Penelope” episode. Her essay “‘Coming Events Cast Their Shadows Before’: Tarot, Theosophy, and the ‘Memory of the Earth’ in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” examines esotericism and the clairvoyant feminine power in the novel, and was awarded Distinguished Essay at the 300 Level in 2025.

Her inspirations include Louise Glück, Gertrude Stein, Etel Adnan, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashbery, though she considers The Waves by Virginia Woolf the ur-text of her life. More of her favorites are Orlando, Anne Carson’s Plainwater, Of Cities and Women by Etel Adnan, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Above all, she believes in writing with both devotion and defiance: swooning over language’s brilliance while also breaking its rules with reckless care—all the while caring too much to stop. She is currently based in Long Island, NY, where she continues to forge her path in literature, poetry, and the arts.

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