Olivia Gatwood
Quick answer: How Olivia Gatwood writes: odes to unpraised girlhood, period-exact detail and true-crime tension, with practice exercises and the best books to start with.
Olivia Gatwood made the ode dangerous again. The American poet, born in 1992 and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, came up through the slam circuit with poems praising exactly what girls are taught to apologise for: the unimpressed expression, the bitten nails, the bodies of best friends at sleepovers. Her collections New American Best Friend (2017) and Life of the Party (2019) carried that project from stage to page, and her novel Whoever You Are, Honey followed in 2024.
Two engines drive her work: the contemporary ode, sincere praise aimed at unpraised subjects, and a true-crime undercurrent, the awareness that girlhood in America is shadowed by violence. The tension between celebration and threat gives her poems their particular charge.
Who she is
Gatwood became one of the most-viewed performers of the mid-2010s slam wave, toured schools and universities with poems about consent and girlhood, and was a finalist at national competitions before moving fully into books, screenwriting and fiction. Life of the Party, her second collection, was published by a major house and organised partly around her fascination with true crime and the murdered girls the genre consumes.
Her lineage runs through the feminist confessional and the ode tradition turned upside down: where classical odes praised urns and nightingales, hers praise the pink razor, the public high school, the girls who taught her everything adults would not.
The signature moves
Her poems are built from recognisable, learnable parts.
What you can learn
Write an ode to something you were mocked for loving. Keep the form's full ceremony, elevated address, extravagant praise, and aim it without irony. The gap between formal dignity and dismissed subject is where the poem's argument lives.
Practise brand-level memory: list twenty objects from one year of your adolescence, then build a poem in which five of them appear without explanation. Trust readers of your generation to feel the time-stamp, and others to feel the specificity. If your work tends sweet, study her threat-threading: let one line of real danger cross a warm domestic poem and watch the stakes change. Contest judges reading for theme and emotion respond to that doubleness, praise that knows what it is protecting its subject from.
Where to start
Watch her performances of Ode to My Bitch Face and Ode to the Women on Long Island, then read New American Best Friend for the girlhood odes and Life of the Party for the true-crime material. The novel Whoever You Are, Honey extends her interest in women watched and consumed.
What poets can take from this
- Write a ceremonial ode to something you were mocked for loving.
- Time-stamp poems with brand-level objects from one specific year.
- Thread one line of real threat through a warm domestic poem.
- Give a formative friendship the full attention usually spent on lovers.
- Praise without irony; the ode's dignity is the argument.
Try it yourself
Write an ode to a habit, object or expression of your teenage self that adults tried to correct. Use full ceremonial praise, five period-exact details, and one line acknowledging what the world does to people like her.
Questions
What is Olivia Gatwood known for?
Her odes to overlooked parts of girlhood, including the widely shared Ode to My Bitch Face, and the collections New American Best Friend and Life of the Party.
What is Life of the Party about?
The 2019 collection explores girlhood, desire and violence against women, drawing on Gatwood's fascination with true crime and questioning why the genre consumes murdered girls as entertainment.
Has Olivia Gatwood written a novel?
Yes, Whoever You Are, Honey, published in 2024, a novel continuing her interest in watched and idealised women.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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