My second poetry collection, I Was the Jukebox, won the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize (selected by Joy Harjo) and will be launched into the world on April 5, 2010 by W. W. Norton.

Less than a week to go! I should be getting a haircut. Stocking up on champagne. Hanging the streamers. Except that instead of focusing on an exciting debut, I'm pondering a looming deadline. The next portion of my memoir, Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, happens to be due to my editor at Crown on...April 5. When it rains, it pours.

I never planned to become a nonfiction writer. Poetry is my first love. But I proposed Don't Kill the Birthday Girl because, with every year, more people's lives are shaped by food allergies. I've made it to adulthood despite severe allergies since birth (milk, egg, soy, tree nuts, mango, cucumber, beef, shrimp, and the list goes on). If I were a lawyer, I'd be an advocate in the courts. If I were a teacher, I'd be an advocate in the schools. I'm a writer. So if a literary conversation needs to be had about the facts, the challenges, and the cultural issues of food allergies, it's my job to start the conversation.

As you can imagine, this is very different from my approach to poetry. I'll be honest: juggling genres is hard. For example, I'm a midnight-hour poet. I like to move through a day, tumbling a line or phrase over and over in my head like a pebble in a rock polisher, enjoying the secret of it. Only after the rest of the world has gone to bed do I sit down, with glass of scotch, and start writing. A nonfiction session usually consists of waking up, bolting for the laptop--no making the bed, no getting dressed, no checking my email--and jumping in before the to-do list gets a hold of my day. If I remember to make a cup of coffee, it'll probably go cold before I remember to take a sip. I'm not some poetic sea nymph, coaxing a pearl from a grain of sand; I'm an architect, building a house. I have notes. I have sources. I have outlines. I have word counts.

If you've figured out a way to be both a night owl and an early bird, will you let me know?

Meanwhile, those to-do list items continue waving their fingers at me: a plane ticket to book, an AWP booksigning to promote, two phone calls to return. With a poetry book on the way this, too, is all part of being a writer.

This doesn't even begin to broach the philosophical intricacies of moving from poetry to prose: forging a new style of sentence, a different pacing of narrative, a standard for what is journalistically "true" versus what is emotionally honest. Sometimes I worry that I'm harvesting so many memories for Don't Kill the Birthday Girl that I'll pick the oyster bed clean, leaving no seeds for next year's growth. What if no one likes it? What if I've spent years developing my credibility as a poet, only to fumble it on a third book that labels me a mediocre prose writer?

You'd think this would be a time of holding my head high, but the truth is that I'm deep in the trenches. April 5, April 5, April 5. The march continues. April 6? Okay. Maybe on April 6, there will be some dancing.