Nicole Gulotta's Blog, page 3

National Poetry Month | Week 4

It's week three of National Poetry Month, and the celebration continues. Feast your hearts (and stomachs) on a few more quotes from the Eat This Poem cookbook. (Missed some? Catch up! Week 1 / Week 2 / Week 3)

Get your free cookbook excerpt

#ACoupleAdopts Baby Shower + Red Pepper and Walnut Hummus

Back in February I had a few quiet moments one Sunday afternoon, so I finally got around to wrapping a baby gift I'd been holding on to since October. The only thing was, this baby wasn't born yet. The next day, my friend Sonja texted me that her new little bundle Larson had arrived, and they were getting ready to drive home from the hospital. Cue the happy tears!

I put her gift in the mail that afternoon.

This isn't an ordinary birth story, though. Alex and Sonja have been waiting and hopin...

National Poetry Month | Week 3

It's week three of National Poetry Month, and the celebration continues. Feast your hearts (and stomachs) on a few more quotes from the Eat This Poem cookbook. (Missed some? Catch up! Week 1 / Week 2)

Get your free cookbook excerpt

National Poetry Month | Week 2

It's week two of National Poetry Month, and we're celebrating with quotes from the Eat This Poem cookbook.

Get your free cookbook excerpt

National Poetry Month | Week 1

The Eat This Poem cookbook is here—just in time for National Poetry Month! To celebrate, I'm sharing one quote from the book every day. Here are the offerings from Week 1. 

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"Tea" by Jehanne Dubrow + Almond Poppy Seed Scones

In the early days of the Eat This Poem blog, I accepted poetry submissions for upcoming posts. One day, a beautiful little sonnet appeared, and I loved it so much I tucked it away. I'd just started exploring the idea of a cookbook, and knew I wanted to keep this poem to include inside. The only problem was, it took years to finalize and get to the point when I needed to reach out to publishers and poets for permissions.

"Tea" just sat in my file, marked up, underlined, waiting. When I finally...

What Eat This Poem Is Really About

Photo by Peter McEwen

In elementary school, I always cringed whenever I was assigned a group project. I was the kid who believed she could do the report/presentation/research better, faster, and more successfully than any of my classmates.

I wanted to work alone.

This remained my guiding philosophy for years until, slowly but surely, I started embracing the benefits of creative collaboration.

I can probably thank adulthood for this. As kids and as students—even with part-time or summer jobs—l...

The Day the Books Arrived

I want to tell you what it felt like to hold a copy of Eat This Poem in my hands. I wanted to tell you sooner, right when the box of books arrived at my door, but I needed to think. Process. Absorb. Gather my thoughts.

So, let’s start at the beginning.

The books were scheduled to arrive at my publisher’s warehouse in Colorado on February 17, so you can imagine my excitement to receive an email a week early saying the books were here (!!) and UPS would be picking them up in a few hours (!!).

I...

5 Reasons Poetry Matters, Now More Than Ever

“Poetry arrived
in search of me.”

This is how Pablo Neruda describes his intimate and mysterious relationship to the craft. His experience echoes many others—poets and writers who have difficulty explaining why exactly they write, only that they cannot not write. One day they went about their lives, when suddenly they were struck, compelled, or inspired to put pen to paper.

My experience was similar. As an assignment for my sophomore year, second period English class, we were asked to flip thr...

A Big Writing Mistake—Or, the Most Overused Word in My Manuscript

A few days after Thanksgiving, I received a note from my editor that the book was going to print very soon. Next week! That meant in early December, Eat This Poem was off to the press. I wrote back, exactly: “Eeek! (And also, pretty exciting!)”

Getting to this point was roughly a seven month process that included several rounds of revisions—from my editor, me, and a team of copyeditors trained to find inconsistencies like “Can we say yellow onion instead of brown onion?” or “Pepper is liste...