COMMON GROUND: “THERE’S A POEM IN THAT!”

“I’LL SHOW THEM!” PART 2

Kelsey Bigelow is quick to point out that women of my generation aren’t the only ones who have struggled to find their places in careers that are male dominated. In her case, think Dante, William Wordsworth, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, or Billy Collins. Kelsey is 32 years-old, living in Des Moines and making her living as a poet. And don’t you dare say she can’t make a living as a poet. Don’t get her started talking about how she “showed them.” In this case, “them” is her family, her teachers, former employers, even other poets, some of them male, some older and more conventional. She’s having none of it.

She’s part of the Iowa Writer’s Collaborative that I joined a year ago, and I’ve been with her online and in person when she’ll suddenly interject, “There’s a poem in that!” It’s become her catchphrase. Poems surround her just waiting to be discovered, shaped and shared. She says she thinks in metaphors.

I found her poetry collections in the Iowa section locally at Beaverdale Books, but you can order them including her newest book, Far from Broken, online. She teaches classes, organizes poetry workshops and serves as Chair of the National Poetry Slam. She’s just finished a year-long book tour which put well over 20,000 miles on her hybrid compact SUV filled with merch and books she’s written, published and marketed.

I’m not sure how many times over our coffee at Zanzibar’s she said, “I showed them.” She had read a column I wrote in 2025 by that name about Mariangela Hungria, World Food Prize Laureate, a female Brazilian microbiologist and Pam Johnson, farmer and first female President of the National Corn Growers Association. Kelsey insists that I expand my search for women who have “showed THEM” to include those from her Gen Y generation.

SHE CALLS HERSELF A ‘MENTAL HEALTH POET’

I wonder what ignites the fierce undercurrent of her narrative. Why does she call herself a “mental health” poet? Eventually I find out. She grew up in rural Wisconsin. “Creative careers were barely a thing unless you were a teacher. I also grew up in a broken home. I grew up around abuse, neglect and addiction. There’s something about growing up in a traumatic environment in a small town where your options seem limited,” she explains. She also lost her mother to cancer in 2014 when she was 21. Now she helps people use poetry as a coping tool to deal with trauma.

And then we get to the meat of it. “Something in me knew that I was always meant for more and every next step was like, ‘This can’t be it!’ And even right now, I know I didn’t come this far to come this far. There’s more. There’s bigger. There’s better out there. There’s something telling me I can do it. I didn’t live through all that crap just to not do anything to help other people going through that stuff. I’m going to keep going. Being resilient is exhausting but it’s beautiful.”

In high school Kelsey “loved everything creative.” She was a dance teacher and sang in choir. “The adults in my life kept telling me I had to get a real job, that I had to be realistic, that creative careers were not possible. Well, I’m a full-time poet,” she says emphatically. After high school she took a year off before getting her BA at Wisconsin-Platteville. “To the people who said I’d never go back, I did go back to school, and I showed them. I did everything on campus. I was in every club. I worked three jobs. I was president of our leadership society. I was also secretly writing poetry. Then I took a poetry class, and it ended up changing my life.”

The same semester she took the class, her mom died of cancer, “so my poetry became about that.” She says her first book of poems, Sprig of Lilac, includes the poems she wrote to deal with grief.

When she graduated, the adults in her life assumed she’d teach. Instead, she left Wisconsin for a job in Des Moines. She worked as an editor for Two Rivers Marketing. Within a few weeks of arriving in Des Moines she found the Des Moines Poetry Slam “which is how I discovered I like the spoken word,” she says.

A POETRY SLAM: A SPOKEN WORD COMPETITION

I’m still thinking Robert Frost or Gwendolyn Brooks, but now I know that a Poetry Slam is a monthly spoken word competition. “It’s a whole world,” says Kelsey and it’s happening in communities all around the U.S. and internationally. Kelsey explains that there are three rounds, and 12 poets read one poem in round one. Judges are randomly selected from the audience. They give each performer a score of 0.0-10.0. The top seven move on to the second round and the top three move on to the third. Poems must be three minutes or less and original to the speaker. “We do it for fun,” says Kelsey.

At her first poetry SLAM at Java Joes In Des Moines, she met Iowa founder Heather Knowles, who signed her up to perform without asking. That night she made it to the second round. Afterwards Heather asked whether she enjoyed it. Her response? “That was absolutely terrifying and I’m doing it for the rest of my life,” Kelsey told her. She started going to the monthly SLAM and open mics where she met the Iowa poetry community. That opened new opportunities.

She started getting paid to do performances and lead workshops. In 2018 she started the Des Moines Poetry Workshop, a monthly writing night and a monthly critique group which meets around the yellow table at Smokey Row on MLK Avenue. She is the staff person for Poetry Palooza, which used to be the Des Moines Poetry Festival scheduled for February 14.

When she didn’t get the opportunities to grow in her job at Two Rivers Marketing, she took a job at F&G and worked her way to content strategist while getting her master’s degree online in strategic communications from the University of Iowa.

“I’LL SHOW THEM!” I THINK SHE WILL

After she finished her degree, she made the decision to become a full-time poet. Enter her car filled with poetry collections and merch. She’s her own manager, marketer, and bookkeeper in every respect. She started her tour early in April of 2024 with her first full-length collection, Far from Broken, which “unpacks her life in therapy and chronicles building a healthy life of her own. She calls it a “poetic memoir”. She finished the tour June 2025. It included bookstores and poetry events around the country, where she meets people who invite her to their local poetry events. She was paid for performances at mental health conferences and workshops at venues like The Mayo Clinic.

In the organizing, business side of her career she struggles with being taken seriously by the men she encounters. She insists that poetry has always been a man’s world. “The act of a man having to respect my leadership has always been a factor,” she insists. In college she led a big event, and during a virtual meeting, the head of the IT team muted her microphone so she couldn’t respond to questions even though she was the person making the decisions. That forced her to communicate only in the chat. “That guy didn’t last much longer,” she adds. “I’m also the director of our national poetry slam. It took me a while for men to respect that and let me lead.”

“In the poetry world, I do the exact same thing as other poets. They are known for their poetry. I’m known for the events that I put on. I’d like to be known for my poetry.” Can’t you just hear what comes next? “I’ll show THEM!” I think she will.

Postscript:

As a woman who lost her mother to cancer as a teenager, I find Sprig of Lilac cathartic these many years later. Here’s the first poem in that collection, written, Kelsey says, to those who have lost a mother but didn’t have to watch them suffer a slow death.

I Envy You

You who didn’t have to

Go about your day

For 3.245 days

Lying to anyone

Who asks if you’re okay

While being consumed

With unrealistic dreams

Of having your mom

At your college graduation

You did not have

To sit helpless a

As she seized

For the third time

In two days

For the fourth weekend

In a row or

Have to help her feel normal

While being aware that your hand over hers

Was exponentially stronger

And the thought of hugging her

Meant holding her into dust

You did not have

To live your life

While hers was slowly ending

But you do have

To live your life without her

And for that

I Feel you