about Sunny Lately
Sunshine “Sunny” Lately (she/they) is a queer Kentuckiana poet, artist, and community organizer. They first enjoyed a career as a speech-language pathologist before pursuing poetry. Whether as a clinician or creative, Lately believes in the restorative and contagious powers of apology-free expression.
poetry:
Lately’s first full-length work, Lye, is forthcoming in Fall 2025 with Fernwood Press.
Lye poetically and thematically follows the ingredients of soap making—ash, water, and oil—to explore how one might wash their hands of a messy and traumatic past.
If ash represents the frail damage after fire has its way, and if water represents the emotional response thereafter, then these elements would combine only to create lye: a stinging, caustic compound that reminds too much of the original flame. Yet this is exactly how generational trauma continues—a cycle of burning and burning.
It would seem the final and often-missing ingredient to transform lye into something cleansing is nothing but oil: softness and levity. How might we caress such a soothing balm onto our rawest wounds? How might we turn the endless cycle of reactivity into something new, fresh, and fragrant? Lye doesn’t balk in its offering of candor, poetry, and memory as it suggests its answer to these important questions.
You'll also find Sunshine's poetry published in Sarabande's anthology Once a City Said, and literary magazines such as Fatal Flaw, Major 7th Magazine, Rogue Agent, local zines, and more.
art:
As an artist, hobbyist, and ever-curious Gemini, Lately continuously explores new creative forms: cycling regularly between crochet, pottery, painting, collage, digital art, photography, and more.
Lately’s core passion with anything they create is to inspire others to create.
In kind, they recently launched “Journaling Lately”—a line of blank art journals featuring Lately’s original cover artwork. Journals can be purchased here and on Amazon.
Follow @sunshine.lately (Instagram) and @sunnylately (TikTok) to see their newest creations and product releases.
community:
In summer of 2023, Lately founded Golden Hours Workshop on the belief that writing was never intended to be a solitary art form.
In these free monthly gatherings, Lately combines group and art therapy techniques to facilitate generative writing workshops that are comfortable and accessible. These gatherings allow introverted, neurodivergent, and beginning writers to create, share, and experience community while being psychologically and socially safe at the same time.
As an organization, Golden Hours is proud to prioritize inclusivity: aiming to debunk the common myth that modern poetry is an inherently white and elitist art-form. In fact, the roots of poetry are fundamentally and inarguably punk, ancestral, queer, and revolutionary.
Golden Hours workshops are for you if:
the idea of a writing workshop scares you
you want to network with other like-minded creatives
you’ve always wanted to try creative writing
you’ve been writing for a long time, but only with your “inside voice”
your writing can only be found in your private journals and Notes App
you want to believe in your own art and gain confidence in sharing it with others
you’re hoping to find your voice
