Alyx Chandler (she/her) is a poet from the South, currently living in Chicago, Illinois, where she teaches English and composition at various colleges and poetry to kids across the city as a Poet-in-Residence for the Chicago Poetry Center. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana, where she was a Richard Hugo fellow and taught poetry. She is a winner of the Three Sisters Award in Poetry for NELLE Literary Journal, a recipient of a Creative Catalyst Grant from the Illinois Arts Council, and a judge for Chicago’s Poetry Out Loud competition. Her poetry has been featured alongside visual art inspired by her words in exhibitions like Bodies Luminousand made into music by a composer and performers for Ear Taxi Festival. For five years, she led poetry workshops through Free Verse Writing Project and published the art of Montana youth who were incarcerated, in psychiatric care, or in youth homes. Hollering Spell, her first collection of poetry, was published in 2026 as a finalist in the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition for Finishing Line Press, and Girl of the Year, her second poetry chapbook, is forthcoming with Red Bird Chapbooks in 2027. She reads poetry for Unwoven Literary & Arts Magazine, and her work can be found in Painted Bride Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southeastern Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, and elsewhere at alyxchandler.com.
PRAISE:
Like many a Southern gal with a sweet drawl, the poems in Alyx Chandler’s Hollering Spell are smarter—sharper, wiser, more deft and deeply cutting—than their good manners might make them look. But first, let’s praise those manners, or, as they ought to rightly be called, craft: These poems ripple with the music of carefully deployed alliteration, imagistic derring-do, and the lost art of multi-leveled metaphor where girlhood, for instance, is “a fresh-cut lawn / where secrets [are] coiled // like a water hose / stuck in kinks // spouting knots / writhing in grass // begging to spit.” Chandler takes what could be sentimental in less skilled hands—family, place of origin, memory—and, like peeling the shell from a fat Gulf shrimp, reveals the richness that is possible through the act of genuinely curious examination. As Chandler writes, “I know antennas / are all about intimacy.” And so are these perfect poems.
–Keetje Kuipers, author of LONELY WOMEN MAKE GOOD LOVERS
Hollering Spell is for anyone who suspects “beauty / ain’t shit but it exists” and rather revel in the body’s visceral joy. You will devour and savor the “sweet paired with / sting” Alyx Chandler cooks up here. I know I have and will for years to come.
–Tina Mozelle Braziel, author of Glass Cabin and Known by Salt
Is pride a wound or a weapon, and what’s that make Chandler’s hometown–a speck that she can’t make out but try, a bullet hole, a turtle creep of Toyotas, old airfields, short-leaf pines hug-haunting a highway? Alyx Chandler is as bitingly Southern gothic as one can get in such a short space. Chandler’s poetry, a mountain dark as urge, has such McCullersian wit and eye that I lassoed between guffawing and getting gut busted. Did I attempt to erase my lineage to cruelty? I love these poems, how all roads lead me South in them, how I, too, want to get a little hollering just to holler out. How I ask myself and every Southerner I know: what part of your accent has survived? And then I tell them to read Hollering Spell, read it right now under the devil’s billboard on I-65.
–C. Russell Price, author of Bisquick: An American Séance
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