What is Kro up to right now?
The latest updates
July, 2025 (From Substack)
When I was a child, my family took us up here to the Chippewa Flowage every year for nineteen consecutive years. From the ages of four to twenty-three, I would spend the week of the summer solstice puttering among the pines and getting lost in the lichens. My dad would take me out on the fishing boat, and I’d sit at the very front, wind blasting my face like a dog with its head out the car window.
Some of my earliest literary memories are tangled up in the Chippewa Flowage. I remember being eleven years old and squatting down low in the boat while it bounced over the lake, trying to scribble down lines of poetry that popped into my head. I remember being curled up on the couch in the cabin, reading every single one of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, one after the other.
This is the twentieth year I have been to these woods, though it’s non-consecutive. It’s the first time I’ve been back in a decade. A lot has changed, and nothing has. The rain still pitter-patters and the birds still call, though I’ve learned to identify red-eyed vireos. I’ve been working on a manuscript, and I’ve been submitting my poetry to magazines. There’s not a lot of flashy or interesting things happening up-front. But it’s the slow, inglorious day-in-day-out work that makes the whole thing work.
I have a lot of cool projects in my head, but I’m taking a break!
I have an read-a-poem-leave-a-poem poetry art installation that I want to hang up in a local Chicago business. I want to spruce up the interactive Google map of the Buddhist pilgrimage I took in 2023, with a sampling of some of the 200 haikus I wrote. I have a mycelium-themed collaborative writing project I want to pass around to my fellow poets like a hot potato. I’ve been daydreaming about forming a union. In short, there are a million things I want to do!
But I’m letting myself take a break before I jump into the fire. I just barely got out of the frying pan. I don’t particularly enjoy being scorched.
News and updates
I’ll be hitting the ground running now that it’s July! You can find me on the street on Tuesday, July 1st, and Wednesday, July 2nd. Tune into my Instagram to get the most up-to-date information about where I’ll be appearing! Otherwise, you can find me at a few scheduled appearances below:
Southport Arts Fest, July 12 (10-5pm)
Southport Arts Fest, July 13 (10-5pm)
Fulton Fridays, July 18 (5-10pm)
Dead Dad Reading Series, July 20 (3pm) at Humboldt Park
Peatland Poetry for International Bog Day, July 27 (1pm) at Volo Bog
Surprise street performing popups as the whimsy strikes me!)
What’s Kro working on?
I am currently working on short stories about the secret lives of street performers. Have you ever wondered what a typewriter poet does when they get home? How about those statue impersonators who paint themselves silver? Or how about the accordionist on the street corner who plays French cafe music all day? I’ve written a whole passel of stories that are only somewhat fictionalized accounts of my life and the lives of my fellow weirdos who make a living performing on the street. I’m sending them out for submission. I’ll let you know if they get accepted anywhere.
What’s Kro reading?
Now that I’m out of grad school, I don’t have a captive audience of professors and classmates who are forced to read my work and give me feedback. I’ve spent the last few terms learning how to provide good feedback, and now I’m turning those lessons on myself. One of the best things I learned in grad school was how to edit my own work. But it never helps to refine those skills.
