Something Salty is Coming...

My Newest Poetry Collection: The Salty Daughter Debuting Next Year

I’ve been holding this close for a long while, and now it’s time to let you in. My newest book of poems, The Salty Daughter, will be arriving in 2026.

If Mud Water Will Rise was an exploration of the South’s beauty and contradictions, a book that sought common ground and pointed toward unity, The Salty Daughter is something different. This collection isn’t just political. It is a protest. It’s my refusal to stay silent in a nation that keeps legislating silence.

These poems rise in the face of America’s current tide: the rollbacks on women’s rights, a never-ending increase in gun violence, the book bans sweeping classrooms, the criminalization of truth-telling, and the casual cruelty that seeps into law. They carry salt for the wounds of systemic racism, for minority voices under attack, for every woman told to stay small, polite, and quiet. They are written in the name of outrage, clarity, and resilience.

But The Salty Daughter is also a personal memoir. It maps my own transformation from a California girl, protected by blue-state borders and lulled into believing progress was permanent, to a Southern transplant staring hypocrisy straight in the eye. Out here, injustice doesn’t live in headlines. It lives in your neighbor’s yard sign. In your courthouse. In the daily compromises demanded by a system built to exclude. Moving to the South stripped away my illusions and forced me to confront the truth most Americans already know… safety was never evenly shared.

the southern political landscape was the tipping point of …

my breaking.

an undoing of immoral influence / an unscrewing of the mind / now i see clearly / we are just jesters of the empire / clawing to the surface / to uncover the soiled truth / of our so- called political leaders / their blinding pride / and concrete deceit / ready to deplete / our vitality / as we remain buried beneath the red dirt / our dried senses / leaving us defenseless / below the trenches / awaiting the [im]moral war to come.

- “My Breaking” featured in The Salty Daughter by Chelsea Chatts

So, two things can be true: this book is my political beliefs and my own personal protest, but it’s also my self-discovery. A reckoning with the brine I was born from and the currents I’ve chosen to swim against.

The Salty Daughter is for those who know salt as both wound and preservation. For the ones marching, testifying, teaching, mothering, creating, surviving, and resisting. This book is for the women who refuse to be washed out.

In the following months, paid subscribers will be the first to glimpse what’s stirring beneath the surface: early poems, behind-the-scenes notes, the raw edges of a book still finding its spine.

The tide is turning. And we are not just watching it rise. We are the ones making it rise, together.