Congratulations!
Assistant teaching professor and poet Dr. Devon Fulford recently published her fourth poetry collection, onus, with Alien Buddha Press!
Fulford’s new chapbook takes on a wide range of experiences women face, from the ache of childhood loneliness to the harsh realities of online misogyny. In onus, Fulford’s writing balances sharp observation with intimacy, offering readers a chance for reflection while navigating complex, challenging issues.
Describing the book as “both deeply personal and reverberating,” the publisher praised Fulford as a poet and educator who “does not balk at the raw edges of experience.”
As we celebrate the launch of onus, the Department of English is thrilled to share a Q&A with Fulford, where she provides insight into her writing process, the origin of onus, where she’s finding inspiration lately, and more, below.
Q&A with Devon Fulford
Diving into onus, what’s the origin story behind these poems? How did they come to be, and when did they start to cohere into a collection for you?
The central topics of onus are the childless woman, sexuality, misogyny and rape culture, and girl-to-girl bullying. During the winter of 2024, I read a fascinating book of surrealist poetry by Kristin Bock called Glass Bikini. I was so taken by Bock’s bizarre, dreamlike writing and decided I’d attempt a similar style to write about contentious topics and ideas. Doing so felt like a means to confront truly ugly things without having to name them in the way my typical prose poetry would. After writing about 20 of these sorts of poems, I realized I also had some unpublished prose poetry that aligned with the main themes of the manuscript.
The chapbook is described as an “exploration of femininity in modern America” – can you share more about this lens and what you hope people take from the reading experience?
All of my recent writing has centered on topics faced by women. The ways we consider ourselves and others through the lens of gender/sexuality are ever-changing. In 2025, women face many of the same issues as women did in, say, 1965, and there are also vast differences. I suppose my hope is for people to slow, to consider the weight we all carry as humans having this lived experience, and perhaps to opt to be a bit more caring in our interactions with one another.
You have three more projects slated for release in 2026 . What does your creative practice and writing process look like? How do you balance writing, research, and teaching?
As much as I would not encourage my students to follow my lead in this particular regard, I am very much a binge writer. I come upon a contest or publication to which I’d like to submit, wait until there is a week or two left before the deadline, then absolutely dump poetry onto the page. I usually write for a few days, then put it down and ignore it. If I come back to it and still enjoy or feel compelled by what I’ve written, I feel comfortable moving forward with editing, organizing, and otherwise preparing to submit for publication. I do something similar with my teaching preparation, though on the opposing end of the deadline: I typically have my entire semester planned and detailed in Canvas within the first couple of weeks of the semester. This opens up more time to be creative and do research, which is otherwise pretty challenging when teaching a 4/4 course load each semester.
What are you currently reading/listening to/engaging with that’s inspiring you?
I’ve been concurrently reading multiple books in different genres, and right now, I’m reading Peter Elbow’s craft book Writing with Power and a memoir called The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley, and I’m rereading Jericho Brown’s poetry collection, The Tradition. In my ears, I am regularly jamming out to Banner Pilot, The Swellers, Red City Radio, and AM Taxi. I’ve also been devouring art exhibitions, the most memorable of which is called Once Within a Time —a fantastical and terrifying exploration of New Mexico’s history situated all over the city of Santa Fe.
What are you looking forward to most this semester?
A Reading with Devon Fulford
Saturday, September 13
11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Zwei Brewing (4612 S Mason St #120 Fort Collins, CO 80525)
This event is free and open to the public—all are welcome!
Devon Fulford (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections thrum (2026), hopscotch (2026), you can still drown in the shallows (2026), onus (2025), gulp (2024), the skin song (2024), and southern atheist: oh, honey (2021). She serves as the faculty director for the Literacy Through Prose and Poetry at Colorado State University program, where she teaches writing and literature courses. Devon holds a Doctor of Education in transformative leadership and is in the first year of a PhD in creative writing, in which she is composing a craft book about the benefits of using experiential learning in the writing classroom.