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AJ White didn’t always write poetry. In fact, to do so, he must work hard to turn his rational brain into a poetic one.

But as a student, White went through several formative experiences that changed how he approached the world. First, he began the journey to sobriety and second, he began to read contemporary poetry and discovered meditation.

“Meditation makes my life possible. It enables me to survive,” White said. “It took me a long time to come to poetry because it is generally about not knowing and how that ties into feeling. But meditation is a path toward understanding. It’s a path toward acceptance and toward less suffering for your life, and that became a huge part of my writing.”

White is now pursuing his doctorate at ��ñ��, where he is in his fourth year of the creative writing program. Originally from northern Georgia, he earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his master’s from Virginia Commonwealth University.

As he learned about creative writing opportunities and attempted to break into the field, White realized that he didn’t have the same process as many writers. He often starts by taking a walk and believes that writing actually begins with the act of reading.

He says, however, that it’s rarely so simple as a strike of inspiration.

“I don’t think poetry is composed of images — to me, it’s composed of sound,” White added. “I’m a poet because I like words that sound good together, and that will always be a texture and a component to it. But really, I just start with a line. Sometimes I have a full idea right then, but more often, I find it somewhere else.”

Recently, White was chosen as a winner of the National Poetry Series competition by Chelsea Dingman for the University of Georgia Press. He was one of five national winners of this prestigious book award; his collection, Blue Loop, is forthcoming through the press in September 2025.

In his early days of his creative writing — when he was still focusing heavily on fiction — White was interested in observing the world. Many of his works were themed around place and nature and, more specifically, rivers and clouds. He feels as if this connected him to the world that came before him.

“I consider spiritualism to be the interconnectedness of everything that exists,” White said. “Rivers are a connecting force. When I live around rivers, it helps me think not just historically, but prehistorically, about what humans are at their roots, which I also write a lot about.”

Blue Loop took a bit of a different bent. He recalls realizing that to make the best product he could, he would need to find something that was unique to him.

“When I knew I was going to submit the book, I asked myself, ‘What can I write about better in poetry than anything else?’ The answer wasn’t rivers, and it was not clouds and it was not geese,” White said. “It turns out it was astronomy. I read a lot about that topic, and I’m obsessed with astrophysics. I think that material inherently is incredibly poetic.”

Originally called Astron, White said the project solidified one day around a natural phenomenon he discovered browsing the web — and it eventually led to the collection being renamed.

“Stars start out very hot, and they cool for billions of years. A blue loop is an abnormality, where a star that should be cooling becomes hotter and hotter and hotter before it exits that loop, hopefully, and then continues as normal,” he said. “I felt like, in the process of my life, I was caught in a blue loop, and I was getting worse and worse and worse. I was going to die from that — I was in a fatal disease — unless something changed.”

The collection centers, narratively, around the way addiction can affect a life; the actual center is composed of centos, a type of poem that collages lines from other material to make something new. White decided to compose his “self-centos” out of other lines used throughout his own collection.

“My book is largely about how self-centered I can be, and I think we all are, and how that’s part of our existence,” he said. “I think the centos finally communicated to a judge the aboutness of this book, or what it is doing that no one has done before, and that maybe helped it excel.”

White also decided to add some structure to the collection by splitting it into sections, beginning each with what he calls a “cleave poem,” which he describes as a poem that can be read both up and down or across. He says that to him, this further contributed to its loop-like nature.

White also received inspiration from other artists. Jean Valentine, for example — coincidentally, another artist in recovery — showed him how to be comfortable “writing the way that his brain works” by getting small things on the page, instead of focusing on completing the whole. He takes this skill into his teaching, where he derives much of his passion.

He strives, he added, to create a positive experience for his class — an environment three hours a week where they can come, feel safe and create.

“Students think that my purpose is to show them how much I love writing, and that it is great. That’s true, but what I try to teach them is that writing helps you be a human. Writing helps you live your life,” White said. “I’m not teaching you so that you can compose great business emails, though it might help. I teach you writing because it’ll help you be a healthier, better person.”

White hopes to impart this lesson, in part as a thanks to ��ñ�� and the program that provided him structure through a difficult time. Just as writing in general helped make him a healthier, better person, he realized, it’s not only the attention we devote to our craft but the relationships we forge that connects us.

“This program gave me all the space that I needed to get well and do the things that I came to do,” White said. “I came for a doctorate but got space and time and healthcare and even some experience teaching. I don’t know that any of this would have happened without the kindness, the friendships, mentoring and the positive feedback that I’ve gotten here.”