I’m happy to welcome poet Regina Lewis. Today, Regina shares her writing journey and debut poetry collection, Spotlight on Unladylike.
Here’s Regina!
What was your inspiration for this book?
Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love is my answer to leaving a toxic relationship. After I left, I began recognizing the pattern and disengaging from it. But I also wanted to put something back into my life. To understand what that could be, I needed to understand what I was taking out.
What had I taken in as love? What toxic love language had I learned to speak, accept, and organize my life around?
This book became the provocateur. Poetry allowed me to question that language, to name what I was purging, and to imagine what I wanted to create in its place. I wanted a language of love in which I could remain present, whole, and recognizable to myself.
The poems became coordinates that would lead me back to myself again and again and again.
Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love also grew from a question I could no longer postpone: What would it mean to stop waiting for someone else to prove that I was worthy of love?
I know how to make things work. I know how to survive, adapt, and find possibility in difficult circumstances. But I began to wonder what it would feel like for love to hold me, too. Writing these poems gave me a place to hear my own longing without abandoning myself to it.
The book became an act of self-mothering. Through image, rhythm, and memory, I began reclaiming parts of myself that had learned to go quiet. Each poem (again) became a coordinate back to me.
What is the best part of being an author? The worst?
The best part is when something deeply personal finds a home in another person. A reader recognizes herself in a sentence, and suddenly an experience she thought was hers alone has language. That connection means a great deal to me.
The hardest part is releasing work that matters to me and accepting that I cannot govern how it will be received. I can be careful, honest, and devoted to the writing, and someone may still misunderstand it. There is vulnerability in that. I’m learning to let the work have its life while continuing to live mine.
If you had a superpower, what would it be?
I would want to help people see themselves before they learned to believe they were unworthy.
I think about the child who begins arranging herself around someone else’s inability to love her. I would want to reach her in that moment and say, “You get to remain yourself. Their inability to recognize your worth does not erase it.”
Perhaps writing is one way I keep reaching for that superpower.
Any advice for aspiring writers?
Pay attention to the language you use when you aren’t trying to sound like a writer. Your voice may already be there—in the way you tell a story, ask a question, or name something that everyone else walks past.
Give yourself permission to write before you understand everything you’re writing about. Sometimes the image arrives before the meaning. Stay curious long enough to discover what it holds.
Then return and do the work of shaping it. Read aloud. Listen. Revise. Your experience deserves care, and so does the reader who will meet it on the page.
What are you working on next?
I’m developing workshops that invite people to write their wounds into myth.
This grows directly from my experience of writing Unladylike . Poetry helped me stay in relationship with myself through change and loss. I want to create spaces where others can explore that possibility, too.
The question guiding me is: How can writing help us remain ourselves while our lives are changing?
Blurb
Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love is a lyrical collection of poetry and prose exploring love, survival, embodiment, and the journey of returning to the self. Blending literary poetry with personal reflection, Regina Louise examines relationships, identity, trauma, healing, and the process of reclaiming one’s voice after loss and betrayal.
Through intimate poems and essays, Unladylike maps the emotional terrain between heartbreak and self-discovery, inviting readers into a deeply human exploration of resilience, self-love, and personal transformation. Her work speaks to readers interested in emotional healing, spiritual growth, women’s voices, and the reclamation of dignity through storytelling and creative expression.
Rooted in mythopoetic inquiry and lived experience, this collection moves through memory, desire, grief, and repair, offering language for those navigating change, recovery, and the search for meaning. Unladylike is both an artistic work and an invitation-to witness oneself honestly and to return to what was always there.
Excerpt
Teeth Jewelry
I didn’t take it lying down—
my legs spread eagle, leaking,
like a broke-back Aphrodite,
or Erzulie Freda dispossessed of her longing.
The way you uninvited me
to the wedding—
I’d planned for two months to attend.
Fresh out of a group home,
I was certain I would arrive.
I showed up at your front door.
My hair set in Jada curls—
edges swooped in,
baby hairs laid down—
two hours under a hot-ass dryer
to get them right.
Your brother answered,
fraudulence jutting from his eyes,
said you weren’t home. Yet.
What about the black and champagne
Bentley in your driveway?
Your hubcapped feet, your only wheels.
It belonged to the girl from Baldwin Hills.
Eyes same color as mine.
Her daddy was a doctor.
Yours ran a dojo.
I took my financial aid money,
got myself a crepe de chine
Norma Kamali mini dress—
on sale, sale, sale at I. Magnin.
Fishnet pantyhose.
My first manicure—
to dig desolation from beneath
my dirty fingernails,
just to look respectable.
In pointed-toe flats,
I kicked and scratched my way
through the door,
two stairs at a time.
I followed my knowing into your lair.
My right hook, a javelin.
I threw a punch at your face—
a black belt trophy, barely missed.
You were fifth degree.
My jaw dislocated instantly
from the butt of your palm.
She ran for her life.
I ran into your fury.
And then—
my skin tore
you bit my face,
my arms,
the tops of my hands,
my wrists
my neck,
my bicep,
my shoulders,
the soles of my hands.
Clad in a blusa campesina,
a peasant shirt, off-the-shoulder,
in technicolor—my flesh on parade
fresh with the imprint of your
Central, lateral incisors.
Canines.
I returned to my social work theory seminar.
I wore your teeth jewelry
like a queen.
A gypsy skirt sashayed my hips.
I wore ankle bracelets
with fake gold coins
and fabricated seashells.
Everyone heard me coming.
I returned from Spring Break
baptized in a pain so exquisite,
one might mistake it
or all of who I was.
No matter.
I got my licks in, too.
Not just for me—
but for Tina Turner.
And all the rest of us
who stayed—
wired to do so.
Author Bio and Links
Regina Louise is a poet, writer, teacher, speaker, executive coach, whose work explores the intersection of memory, belonging, identity, and emotional liberation. The author of three books—two of which have been adapted for film: Somebody’s Someone, Someone Has Led This Child to Believe and Permission Granted: Kick Ass Strategies to Bootstrap your Way to Unconditional Self-Love—she has spent more than three decades helping people transform adversity into authorship through story, self-inquiry, and radical compassion.
A senior teacher with the Hoffman Process, Regina is known for guiding profound conversations about restoring dignity, resilience, attachment, and the art of becoming fully oneself. Whether on stage, in classrooms, behind a microphone, or in intimate workshop settings, she invites audiences to reimagine the stories that have shaped their lives and discover the freedom that awaits beyond them.
Her forthcoming collection, Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love (September 2026), marks her debut poetry collection. Blending poetry, lyrical prose, and aphoristic reflections, it is a fearless meditation on love, loss, self-possession, and the sacred work of returning home to oneself.
Regina Louise lives in California, where she continues to write, teach, and create work that honors the transformative power of language to restore dignity, deepen connection, and reclaim what has always belonged to us.
Website | Instagram | Facebook | Amazon | Bookshop.org
Giveaway
Regina Louise will be awarding a $25 Amazon/Barnes & Noble gift card to a randomly drawn winner. Find out more here.
Follow Regina on the rest of her Goddess Fish tour here.
