08/24/2026
Meet poet Zoë Ryder White! Here's a fun story: her mom and my stepmom have been good friends since their 20s. I remember they came over to our house one time when I was 11, and Zoë was ... 15? 16? 17? (to me at that age she might as well have been 22) ... and she was making jewelry out of sea glass and delicate twisted metal and black silk cords, and 1. With her long auburn hair, on point 90s style and totally chill kind vibes I thought she was literally the coolest teenager I had ever met in my life, my jaw was agape and 2. I wore that necklace constantly as a child and into high school and college. I still have it now.
Fun story part 2: her younger brother wound up going to the same college as me, and one September we decided to make the drive together from Minneapolis to upstate New York. Unbeknownst to our parents, we decided to save the money we'd put aside for a crappy hotel and just ... keep driving. There was a moment where we drove through some mountains in the very early morning and the sun was just beginning to rise and there was mist aimlessly passing over the sapphire roads like herds of ghosts. I was driving and Willis was attempting to sleep crunched against the passenger door. Nina Simone's "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair" came on, and it remains one of the most beautiful moments of my life. I woke him up. We drove until we got to a diner an hour away from Bard where we ordered massive omelets and discussed how we both felt covered in ants.
Cool fact number 3: Zoë was a super cool teenager and remains a super cool adult. She writes gorgeous poetry, and her first full-length collection, The Visible Field, was published this year. A chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Chapbook award and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. HYPERSPACE was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others.