About Lyricality
The Lyricality Collective
We are a Minnesota-based collective of poets, lyricists and patrons with a focused mission:
to support diversity and foster community;
to connect Minnesota-based poets and lyricist/songwriters of all skill levels to one another and to new audiences;
to collaborate with existing arts, cultural, and community organizations to offer celebratory and educational events for poets, lyricist/songwriters, and audiences.
Leadership Team
Executive Artistic Director
Programs Advisor
Finance/Accounting Advisor
Leadership Team Member
Leadership Team Member
Leadership Team Member
Tracy Rittmueller
Executive Artistic Director
Tracy Rittmueller is founder and director of Lyricality. Her poems and articles have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, blogs, and newspapers. She was nominated for a Pushcart award in 2017. Her dream job is to be the person who comes up with all the color names for paint swatches and wallpaper patterns, as long as she can work from home, where she spends a crazy amount of time cooking with her chef husband. She enjoys exploring any interesting nook or cranny of Minnesota’s towns and landscapes. She especially likes leisurely, long nature walks while discussing all things poetry, but if the weather is not nice, she’ll happily hold that conversation at your favorite coffee shop or pub.
Kelly Travis
Leadership Team Member
4. Kelley believes that poetry breathes new ways into how we see, hear, live, and experience the world we thought we knew by using words we all know in an arrangement and order that shocks us out of our normal speech and linear thought. “Poetry bids us to eat the apple whole.” Society may have mostly forgotten the value of poetry, but Lyricality has not.
Micki Blenkush
Leadership Team Member
Micki Blenkush is a poet whose work focuses on themes of connection and disconnection. Writing helps her to notice, and noticing helps her to write. Her idea of a good time is to spend a morning sifting through notes until she finds a bread crumb path leading toward the draft of a poem. She is a 2015 recipient of a Central MN State Arts Board grant and a 2017 – 2018 poetry fellow with the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series Program. She is excited to support the mission of Lyricality for the practical and delightful ways it fosters curiosity and brings people together.
Cassidy Swanson
Leadership Team Member
Cassidy Swanson is a copywriter at BadCat Digital, an editor, and a freelance writer with experience in the fields of publishing, journalism, and digital marketing. As an aspiring novelist and occasional poet, you can almost always find her with her head buried deep in the pages of a thriller novel or scribbling notes on random scraps of paper. Cassidy relishes the rise of Instagram poetry, which she believes has helped revitalize the way people view poetry. She finds the connection fostered between reader and writer to be one of the most genuine and pure, which is why she believes so deeply in the mission of Lyricality. Poetry should be more inclusive and accessible. Individuals go through this world searching for a sense of belonging, and poetry is nothing if not a way to spark that magical feeling of being understood.
Ariel Kirst
Leadership Team Membership
Karl Johnson
Programs Advisor