Meet the Author: Kristin LaFollette

Preparing to publish one book can be a significant undertaking—today’s interviewee is getting ready to release two: a poetry collection and an academic book. I talked with Kristin LaFollette about how she’s approaching the release of her books, how she finds time to write creatively while also working as a tenured professor, and her best advice for fellow writers.

Read on to learn about Kristin’s writing journey and how she’s navigated an evolution in her writing and research!

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Kristin LaFollette is the author of Rehumanizing People of the Past: Bioarchaeology, Medical Museums and Archives, and the Human Remains Trade (SUNY Press, 2026) and the poetry collections Intern Year (Harbor Editions, 2026), Hematology (winner of the 2021 Harbor Editions Laureate Prize), and Body Parts (winner of the 2017 GFT Press Chapbook Prize). She is a professor at the University of Southern Indiana. Learn more at kristinlafollette.com and connect with Kristin on LinkedIn.

You have two books coming out: an academic book and a poetry collection. What was your path to writing them? What’s it like to have two books coming out in one year?

Yes, they are two very different books! So this particular collection of poetry, it's called Intern Year. It's very personal and intimate, and honestly, I think I started writing it because it's about situations that maybe I hadn't really fully processed or grappled with. Poetry for me has always been very therapeutic, and so I think I wrote this collection because it helped me work through some of those things that I maybe hadn't quite processed yet.

Intern Year is a collection of poems, but all the poems tell a consistent, chronological story. Part of it, much of it, is about my family, too, and I feel like I almost made it to honor them and everything that we went through and the experience we had.

I'm trying to figure out how to concisely put this without spending 30 minutes talking about it. It's about a period of time, the intern year. A year of time when I was in this internship program for students interested in the health professions. Simultaneously, while I was doing that internship, I had surgery on my hand and was undergoing therapy.

And then, during this exact same time, my father was in a near-fatal accident, and my brother was with him when it happened. He was nine at the time. This year was just so chaotic and tumultuous. There was so much that happened.

I think it's about them, it's about my family and for them, but it's also about the different roles that I was experiencing in medicine at that time.

I was working with patients, helping patients and caring for patients, while also taking care of myself. I went back to work my first shift post-surgery in the emergency room, and I did that in a full cast. There's not much you can do. You know, you have to wear gloves and everything to do a lot of things in the emergency room, obviously. So just navigating that was difficult.

Then on top of it, just helping my family with everything they were going through and being a caretaker for my father. So that's what the collection encompasses. Mapping out all these different ways that I've experienced medicine in my life.

Then there’s the other book. When you and I were in grad school together, you knew that I was doing a lot of work with arts-based research and teaching, and that was one of my interests. I didn't know that rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) was a thing because we didn't have anybody in our program that did that kind of work.

So it wasn't until after graduation, my first year in my job, I started learning about RHM, getting to know more about that and realized that was really the core of what I was interested in. I went from doing arts-based research to really focusing on the rhetoric of health and medicine in my research.

Research is as much associated with my job as it is my individual interests and passions. This came about because of my interest in RHM, but also because I just really love museums, and specifically medical museums.

I visited the Indiana medical history museum, which is in Indianapolis, for the first time in 2022 or 2023. Just being in there, talking about remains, specifically in technical communication in those contexts—what does that tell people who are visiting the museum about human remains? How does that shape how they then think about the human remains that they're seeing and interacting with?

The museum is really what prompted the creation of my academic book, which is coming out in September. It's called Rehumanizing People of the Past: Bioarchaeology, Medical Museums and Archives, and the Human Remains Trade.

The other part of your question was, what is it like to have two books come out in one year? Honestly, I'm a little nervous about it. I'm so excited about both of them, but they're both so different, and I want to make sure that I can give them the attention that I think they deserve and the promotion that I hope that you want to do when you have a book coming out.

I hope I'm able to do that with both. We'll see how it goes. Really at the core of both projects is the human body. So I think there are ways to bring them together, overlap the work I do, as we get closer to them coming out. Hopefully people will be interested in talking about both.

How did your focus on the rhetoric of health and medicine come about?

I feel like such a nerd talking about some of this, but growing up, I always had such really intense interest in medicine. I can't really explain why, because nobody in my family works in healthcare. My dad was a pilot. He worked for Zimmer Biomet, which is an orthopedic company, but he had no connection whatsoever to any of the actual orthopedic stuff that was going on.

I really, honestly don't know why I had such an interest in it, but when I was young, I was just reading all these medical books and texts and was writing my own encyclopedia entries. I've asked my parents, like, did you think something was wrong with me? My mom says, “No, we were so excited that you're interested in things like this.”

I went to college. I was totally convinced that I wanted to be a physician, and so I went to school to study pre-med, and technically, I was a biology major and a chemistry minor. I did that for three and a half years, and I was studying for the MCAT.

Then I decided I wasn't really that invested in doing that anymore, and which was a difficult thing to come to terms with, because I was so far along in my educational journey. That was a difficult conversation to have with my parents, because they had been paying for my college up until that point, and I decided that I wanted to do something else.

When I was meeting with my academic advisor, she asked me what else I had interests in, and I said writing, because writing was always something that I had done my whole life. She said, “You should try English and just see how it goes. Give it a trial run.” And I did. And in my very first creative writing class, I was convinced: this is exactly what I want to do. I want to do writing.

So I finished my English degree because I had so much with my degree already finished. I took my English classes and still finished on time, and then started my master's degree in creative writing two weeks later. I had to go over the summer with some of my classes to make sure that I got all my English courses in.

But that interest in medicine never went away, and most of what I have written about creatively has been associated with medicine and the body. I just didn't realize people were doing this work in rhetoric and writing studies.

I think I first learned about it because there was a special collection of a journal. It might have been the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, I can't remember, but they were soliciting work that had a medical focus. That was my first introduction to the rhetoric of health and medicine. I thought, “Where has this been the whole time? I could have been bringing all of my interests together,” but it's okay.

Once I learned about it, I dove in head first, and that's really been the focus of my research ever since. In our program, nobody was doing that work. We never read anything in that area, but it did feel like the pieces clicked once I realized that people were out there doing this kind of research.

What does your writing practice look like?

My teaching days are Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I don't teach on Tuesday/Thursday. I typically call Tuesday/Thursday my research days. I try really hard to protect that time. If people try to schedule meetings with me, I try to protect that time really well.

It’s important to me to have that designated writing time, because otherwise it's easy to fall behind with all the other responsibilities that we have as professors, with teaching and service and conferences, everything else that we have going on. I tried to set aside those two days each week to focus on my research.

Recently, I've been focusing on getting everything ready for my academic book that's coming out in September. I just finished reading through the copy edited pages that the copy editor sent me, and oh, that was a tedious process.

I have a little bit of a perfectionist streak. I read through it so closely that it took me forever. But I wanted to make sure that everything was right, because they said the next time I get pages back, if I want to make changes, it might cost money because the page setter will have to make adjustments.

For poetry, it's not really connected with the work that I do as a professor. I am a professor in our Professional Writing and Rhetoric emphasis at my university. So all of my research and work I do in that area counts for my position.

Poetry is something that I do completely on the side, which means I typically have to find time outside of my regular working hours to do it, which is actually fine. I, for some reason, think that I write poetry better in the evenings. I usually try to designate at least a couple, two, three hours a week in the evenings, just to write poetry.

I hand write everything first. I have this awful journal that's falling apart that I handwrite everything in, because I think it helps me to get my thoughts out on paper first before I try to start typing something up.

What has your publishing experience been like?

I published a co-edited collection back in 2020 with a publisher called Emerald Press, and then published a collection of poetry called Hematology in 2021. Most of my publishing experience has revolved around those two books. I also published a chapbook when I was in grad school, but the application process was a little bit different for that.

The process of doing the edited collection was similar to what I'm going through right now with the academic book, except with the edited collection, I had a co-editor, and then you have all of the authors of the individual chapters. So you have multiple people looking at it, providing feedback, making corrections. The process was a lot smoother, less time consuming.

Whereas this time around, with this academic book, it's just me, which is fine but it feels like a lot of pressure sometimes. Like I said, I got these copy edited pages and they're saying, “This is your last time to make big changes, so make sure that everything is how you want it.” I took that very seriously and spent, I don't know, two or three weeks really closely reading through each chapter, making sure everything sounded okay, and leaving comments for the copy editor.

It's with the page setter right now, so I will get the opportunity to say everything looks okay, and we can do some minor tweaks. Then after that, it will go to the printer. And that's that, which is also kind of terrifying.

One of the things I was nervous about was the cover design, because this is the thing that people will see first, and I got to give them some input on what I think would be interesting for the cover. I wasn't sure what they would come up with, and I wasn't sure if I didn't like it, would they change it, or would I be able to give them any feedback?

But I was really pleased with the cover they came up with. Essentially, what I really wanted them to know was I didn't want to have any actual human remains on the cover, because my book is all about humanizing remains and reminding people that these are representations of actual people who had actual lives and experiences. I didn't want it to have human remains on the cover. It felt antithetical to the argument I was trying to make in the book itself. That's what that process has been like so far

With the poetry book, we're still early in the process. The publication date isn't until November, so right now, I'm actually working with an artist on the cover. We are trying to get that worked out and ready, so that they can start advertising the book before it comes out.

But my editor will actually send me an edited version of the manuscript, probably in the next couple months for me to take a look at and make any corrections. That's a little bit what the process has been like with my previous collection of poetry, Hematology, the process was very similar.

I got feedback from the editor, made corrections, and I worked really closely with an artist to make the cover, which I am obsessed with. I love it. She did such a good job. I'm working with her for that same cover artist for this book as well, because I love her work.

These books are coming out almost back-to-back. What does marketing look like for that?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think I'm still kind of working that out. I do have a colleague at my university who's been such a sweet champion of my work, and she is going to organize a book launch for me at my university for the poetry book. So that is very exciting.

I want to do readings with the poetry book, and I'm really hoping that maybe some medical humanities folks will be interested in the book, and maybe have me do some readings, or meetings or talks with their students. I think it would be a perfect fit for current and future healthcare providers, to help them think about different aspects of medicine and what it's like to be a patient or a caregiver.

With my academic book, I felt like when I was writing this book that I didn't want it to be so theoretical that it wasn't actually practical, or couldn't have some real-world use. What I would love is to talk to some actual cultural resource management firms or medical museums about how to take what's in the book and practically apply it to the work that they're doing, so we can better humanize people represented by the human remains in their care.

So we'll see what that looks like. I'm not entirely sure yet, but that's my hope. I want it to get in the hands of these professionals that are actually doing the work, so that it's not just a book, but something that is going to help better represent these people.

Are there other projects on the horizon, or are you too much in the weeds right now?

The thing about me is there's always something on the horizon. I have way too many ideas, and typically not enough time to work on them.

Creatively, I am working on another collection of poetry that's tentatively titled Birds of America. Like I said, all of this is making me sound like a nerd, but I'm really interested in medical history, and so many of the poems in that collection are connected to medical history in some way, or they take an aspect of medical history and apply it to the now. They use that aspect of medical history as a lens to look at the now.

In terms of my scholarship and research, I want to expand the work that I did in my book that's coming out. I'm thinking about taking essentially the same ideas or frameworks that I talk about in that book and applying it to mortuary or death care services.

Specifically, my book is really zeroed in on the technical communication that the professionals use in those different contexts to refer to human remains. I'm thinking about doing the same thing, looking at the technical communication that we use in death care services, for example.

I kind of touch on this a little bit at the end of one of my chapters in the book, but thinking about autopsy reports and death certificates and these kinds of documents—how do they help us think and communicate about people who have passed away? Does the way those help us frame that? Does that adequately represent these people as human beings, or are we looking at them as objects or problems to be solved?

I haven't started the work on that project yet, but I am thinking about it. It's ruminating.

If you have to give a piece of writing advice, what would that be?

I'm going to give the piece of advice that I gave my husband yesterday, because he is currently in a graduate program and he works full time, and so it's tough, as you know. We've been there, right?

He was getting stuck on something, and couldn't figure out what to write next. I do this a lot too. It's easy for me to get stuck, and I'll just sit there and stare at my computer. The next thing I know, 20 minutes have passed and I haven't even written a single sentence.

What I told him is, for me, most of the time, it's more helpful to just get all of your ideas out. Just write, even if it's not coherent or it doesn't make sense or you won't end up keeping it.

Whatever comes into your head, just get it out on paper, because writing something is better than writing nothing. You can always go back later, read through it, and maybe you'll like it. Maybe you won't. Maybe you just want to make some minor corrections. That's the way for me to push past getting stuck.

The other thing I would say too, is that you have to make time for writing, because it's so easy to get pulled in other directions. This happens to me all the time. There's so many things going on at all times that are taking away my attention.

But writing is really important to me. These projects are really important to me, and so I have to make sure that I make the time for them, even if it's just a half an hour in the evening, or I have 20 minutes to work on a project between classes or something like that.

You have to make sure that you set aside the time to do it. It's not always easy, but if you love it and you want to do it, you believe in the project, you make it happen. Give yourself permission to do the things that you love.

What's the best book that you've read recently?

I love listening to podcasts. One of my favorite shows is Criminal, hosted by Phoebe Judge. She's great. There was an episode recently about a crime that took place in Poland in the early 2000s. It was so interesting that I looked up information about it, and found that there was an author who had written an entire essay about it that was published in a collection.

I just finished reading that yesterday, actually, and it's called The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (affiliate link*) by David Grann. Not all of them are true crime. It's got essays about mystery and madness.

It was quite a long book. It took me a little bit to get through, but the stories were fascinating. I really enjoyed it, and I stuck with it until the end. I would suggest it for anybody who is interested in true crime or real-life mystery type things.

Meet the Author interviews are lightly edited for clarity.

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Kristin's advice for writers is well worth revisiting—when you feel stuck, it can help to write everything that comes to mind and save the editing/critique for later. (That can be tricky to do, but it really helps!)

I also love her advice about making real time for writing and giving yourself permission to prioritize the creative work you love. How can you make space for writing in your day?