Lily Darling
Lily has recently published a fiction book called Southing that describes the death of a high school girl in a small Florida town and explores how the community at large attempts to process the loss. The book is set 
against the backdrop of the climate apocalypse and is mostly inspired by her father’s experiences growing up in Boca in the 70s. Lily is interested in how people cope with basic facts of living in a climate that seems to be increasingly categorized as extraordinary. She would like for readers to get the impression that Southing has an age-old narrative that is familiar, and she hopes that readers have to take a breath after finishing the last line. Southing’s narrative and characters are inspired by many different books and authors that Lily loves, including Woolf’s The Waves and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
In addition to her published book, Lily's sonnet, "Skinny dipping in mid-June, there are nightfishers on the beach," was a winner of Inkwell Magazine's "Barbaric Yawp!" poetry contest. It will be published by Inkwell in Spring of 2021 with an accompanying video interpretation that the magazine organizes. The poem was written during Chen Chen's Spring 2019 workshop. In writing it, Lily wanted to focus on sapphic connections to nature's liminal spaces, and how those spaces are irrevocably altered by a sudden, masculine incursion
Lily chose to major in English because she was always encouraged to express herself creatively by her parents, both of whom are artists, and she saw reading and writing as a great means of doing so. She enjoys approaching books from an analytical standpoint, focusing on what authors are doing to give people certain emotions while reading their stories, and she thinks that the “Aha!” moment that English majors have when something the author says finally clicks is very beautiful. She usually reads fiction, but she also loves poetry and highly recommends Hanif Abdurraqib's poetry collections.
On campus, Lily is a poetry editor for Laurel Moon and is a newly inducted member of Poetic Justice. She is currently working on a small creative writing project about her mom’s experience being a model in Europe and Japan in the 80s.