Volume 16.2, Summer 26

Amanda Hodes

Centralia Pennsylvania

footnotes

Amanda Hodes is a writer and new media artist. Her debut collection Into the Into of Earth Itself (Black Lawrence Press, 2026) was the winner of the 2024 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, FENCE, Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, West Branch, Raleigh Review, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, Academy of American Poets (online), Quarterly West, and elsewhere. As an artist, she is interested in sound installation as a route to an embodied, spatial poetics. Her new media work has been exhibited in venues such as the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, Torpedo Factory, Abington Arts Center, Hirshhorn Sound Scene Festival, and Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology. She teaches at Augusta University, and she previously taught creative writing at Oberlin College and Virginia Tech.

The Centralia coal bed mine maps in the center, while dramatically altered here for creative purposes, are available online in their original formats from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection following the dissolution of the Lehigh Valley Coal Company: [link].

The bracketed text in the center are found comments on a YouTube video about Palmerton’s polluted mountain [link].