Celia Battson is a proud Midwesterner from Westphalia, Missouri. Celia reflects on the painful divergence between her early life in a small farming community to a tumultuous upbringing in the much larger town of Jefferson City. Her poems reflect upon her rural upbringing without the suffocating sentimentality. Celia hopes that through her poetry, she can bring more awareness to the raw-boned beauty of Missouri and places like it. She has been published in The Truman Monitor, Oneiroi, Midwestern Heat, and Queer in Rural Missouri Magazine.