APOSTASIES
BY HOLLI CARRELL
Forthcoming September 2025
Holli Carrell’s debut collection Apostasies explores Mormon girlhood, the American West, matriarchal lineage, indoctrination, estrangement, and the lingering ramifications of being raised within a repressive and patriarchal American religious ideology. Interweaving prose, documentary poems, translations, erasures, and spare, imagistic lyrics, Apostasies aims to recover and reclaim the body by its own definition. Casting her experience within the broader narrative of Mormonism, Carrell unpacks the fraught history of gender and polygamy in nineteenth-century Mormonism, exposing the sexual predation and grooming tactics used by Joseph Smith—Mormonism’s founder—on his thirty-three “wives,” many of whom were fourteen to eighteen years old at the time of their marriage. Courageous and defiant, the poems in Apostasies ultimately celebrate doubt and disobedience; they challenge oppressive constructions of womanhood and cisnormativity, in particular rejecting motherhood, “obedience,” and religious traditions that vilify independent thought and bodily autonomy.
About the Author:
Holli Carrell (she/they) is a writer, educator, and editor originally from Utah, now living in Cincinnati, where she is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati with a research concentration in feminist and queer documentary and long-form poetics. A 2024-2025 Taft Research Center Dissertation Fellow, and finalist for The Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, her poetry and essays have appeared and/or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The North American Review, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Bennington Review, and Salt Hill, among other places, and have received nominations for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and The Pushcart Prize. Winner of the 2024 Jean Chimsky Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2022 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest and River Styx's International Poetry Contest, she has received additional fellowships and awards from The University of Cincinnati’s Office of Research, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Hunter College, where she received her MFA. She is a former assistant poetry and nonfiction editor at The Cincinnati Review.