In Conversation with heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

After a long hiatus (while we converted to nonprofit and published 4 new books!) we're back with Season 6 of The Host Dispatch! We're thrilled to be kicking off this season with a very special episode, a conversation with one of our all-time favorite creatures, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes! heidi is the author of Wayward Creatures, which we had the privilege to publish in August of 2025. After a delightful set of readings and an incredible author panel to celebrate Wayward Creatures, we hopped on the mics to talk with heidi about the poet's right to opacity, cultivating a perpetual curiosity, queer joy in the ocean, and much more! We're so happy to be back, and we hope you enjoy the episode!  This is a monster of a book, an ecology of being in which all bodies are poems and all poems are bodies. rhodes asks the reader: How does the poem of us begin? Then, proceeds to dismantle the notion of beginning and ending. In Wayward Creatures, time is a branch from which we fruit, die, and bud again. It is the dark unknowable depth of space. It is the constellatory nature of queer love. Tucked into these pages is the book of crip dreams, which is a kind of scripture, and is also the book you are touching now—with your hot and human hands. — Gala Mukomolova, author of Without Protection