· R L · powell words · literacy & figments
genuinely curious & tolerantly mad
· R L · powell [he/him :: they/them] is a writer of poetry & prose, though bad at sticking to any particular genre. They are the Director & Founding Editor-in-Chief of APROSEXIA LIT PUBLICATIONS, a registered non-profit, and its online poetry journal. He is an educator, champion of all things peculiar & kind, as well as an appreciably cracked intellectual. Out of the disaster of a prolonged education, they’ve managed to salvage a BA(Hons) Specialist in English (conferred with High Distinction) & an MA is in English Languages & Literatures—from schools that think quite highly of their reputations. He parted ways with his doctorate after a substantial amount of research into American modernism, the epistemologies of reading, phenomenology of boredom, philosophy of science & literature, along with whatever else, ABD—but in good standing.
They’ve received support & funding toward their studies in poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars, studied under Michael Dumanis & Randall Mann, and hope to complete their MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts over the course of 2027—by way of carrier pigeon, video conferencing, telepathy, &/or correspondence—whichever method proves faster &/or resistant to geo-political madness, international strife, oppression, revolution, plague, penury, &/or Force majeure. While their first love is poetry, they’d also be perfectly happy to write stories about imaginary places and figments of implausible personalties, up and until he can wrap things up on this planet, and call everything a day.
· R L · has an unusual talent for thinking & teaching critical theory. They maintain a passion for pedagogy, and have been recognized for the quality of their instruction, as well as their uniquely engaging approaches to the critique and analysis of art. Personally, he’s drawn to imaginative examinations of literal & figurative space; work that’s inspired & derived from dreams; irreverent takes on recondite subjects; and bewilderingly minute facets of Japanese anime (アニメ) & Chinese donghua (动画). They know of awful lot of words in English, and tend to use the biggest of them when it would probably serve them better not to. On occasion, they can be quite funny.
After working across an improbable number of professions, industries, & petty jobs; abrupt changes in fortune & life direction; a hodgepodge of in-depth education; a variety of travels; and scads of questionably sound decisions; the choice to write full time happens to be the most sensible one they’ve ever made—and that’s really saying something.
What that something is . . . is anyone’s best guess.
However, and above all else, he’d like you to know what he’s been sure of—in the pit of his heart, all along—and that’s you're doing a magnificent job of being yourself.
what’s imperative to be heard
Over the course of his life, · R L · has written on an improbable number of subjects, across diverse mediums, & experienced dramatic changes in publishing technologies. A focus on the Arts & Humanities have been consistent throughout, but it has taken coming to terms with the realities of illness, neurodiversity, disability, and other sundry barriers to make a professional return to writing possible. It has taken more than half a lifetime to genuinely appreciate the levels of support necessary, and the concessions required, for someone coping with chronic illness to pursue and sustain a professional life in the creative arts. This appreciation is a large part of what brought them to confidently re-enter the creative sphere, and also to founding APROSEXIA LIT, a open-access online poetry journal of work by divergent, challenged, and challenging minds. Recently, he made the decision to expand the scope of the project, which involves developing a greater range of opportunities for non-visibly disabled artists, in publishing but also general visibility, and roads to representation less burdened by assumptions around what constitutes authentic work produced by divergent minds, especially in relation to those less challenged.
So, in mid-life stride, · R L · has made the decision to create a space they haven’t been able to find on their own—one that resists against the attacks against categories such like “disabled,” that working to efface the subjects behind the word by assuming that they are static, easily knowable beings; that disability means a specific forms experience; thus unambiguous and easy to understand what it means to be pitied or ignored. But also make room for an assumption that to be disabled or divergent doesn’t need to be, look, or sound a certain way to be authentic or true. To make the first assumption be that the unknown mind is a given, and no one person’s words needs to be legible to every eye, ear, or finger that encounters them. Because the world just isn’t that simple. It’s not that easy to understand, for anyone.
And to pretend otherwise is such a load of twaddle.
Recent publications :: poetry
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“Never name the cat / after your morning’s emperors”; “One’s song hardly wed committing violence / aside fears of an open kiss, in 1999.”
Mande Literary, 5. Jul: 2026. Online.
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“the gauge left to battery a phone call / requiered to abandon work”
Scavengers Lit Mag, 3. Apr: 2026. digital/print.
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"An Odd Couplet :: Re-set the table to co-opt the entire conversation"; “An Odd Couplet :: About That Boy and Table”; “call to our lips to make pale atoms of our nights.”
The engine(idling, 8: collage. 2026. digital/print.
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“Give me contraints; I will give you a rhino”; “What's to stop ringing up the day when goose & god are hopeless”; “Times when Deepak Chopra's wisdom was free.”
Blood+Honey. Mar: 2026. online.
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“Detections that follow misread lines in a marriage.”
junq magazine, 6. Feb: 2026. print.
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“The take-home at the new box-office / now barely covers the cost of admission.”
fwp 2025: an anthology of queer writing. fifth wheel press. Nov: 2025. print.
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“Polariods I didn't take / only to leave in Basque.”
from, Ingenious Lies About the Museum. ballast, 3.4. Oct: 2025. online.
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“Exhibition without the Museum: iii. Without warning, a pitch of desire.”
from, Ingenious Lies About the Museum. The Inflectionist Review, 21. Oct: 2025. online.
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“upon Return from the ATM.”
junq magazine, 3. Nov: 2024. print.
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“always and still / worlds above.”
Impossible Archetype. 16. Aug: 2024. digital.
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“My Suburbia Was a Woodland.”
The Rising Phoenix Review. Jan: 2024. [since defunct] online. read it here.
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“Frost.”
Eunoia Review. Dec: 2023. Online.
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"And the Sea Brags of Its Shells."
Haven Spec, 11. Nov, 2023. digital/print.
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“Are Bright Things to Pray For.”
Impossible Archetype, 14. Aug: 2023. digital.
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“Five Characters”; “Hurt”
The Rumen. Jul: 2023. online.
the extant
As the name implies, the extant is a broad canvas. What is often described in the circles of science fiction & fantasy as a “secondary world,” the extant is the colloquial name for a distant realm named the Agnyett. It is the the aggregate culmination of worldbuilding over a lifetime, too much education with too few degrees to show for it, and a wealth of underserved stories taking up space in · R L · s head.
The extant is large enough to provide a home all their personal takes on familiar tropes, with potential for the occasional twist on genre stories at home in soft sci-fi, speculative fiction, and fantasy. From their perspective, the extant is running behind on where it could be as fiction set down on the page. Between between poetry & nurturing APROSEXIA on a larger scale, getting a better grip on the extant, and seeing more of it in print, has become a large part of · R L · s writing practice.
