Olivia Gatwood, a Poet With a YouTube Following, Branches Out

A few minutes later, she was slathering lavender oil on her tattooed arms. “I don’t like perfume,” she said. “It makes me feel like a dead lady — like I’m being embalmed.”

Despite all the death talk and the fact that her latest collection of poetry, “Life of the Party,” revolves around violence against women, Gatwood, 27, is easygoing and effervescent (not to mention resourceful — backstage, she turned avocados into impromptu guacamole with little more than a wine key and a coffee stirrer).

She recently finished her tour across the United States with singer Ari Chi and cellist Cailin Nolte. Gatwood plans and funds her own tours and often handles the transportation herself, driving a 10-passenger van from city to city.

Gatwood started performing poetry in high school; soon after graduating, she was part of Brave New Voices, a poetry festival that has been featured on HBO. But many of her fans found her through YouTube, where she has cultivated a mostly female audience with performances of poems such as “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” and “Ode to My Bitch Face” that have garnered hundreds of thousands of views. A children’s book she wrote with Mahogany L. Browne and Elizabeth Acevedo, “Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice,” is scheduled for release in March.

Gatwood grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a city with more than its share of violence (its metro area had one of the United States’ highest murder rates in 2018). The city’s struggles, she said, affected her from a young age. In her poem “BODY COUNT: 13,” she describes the West Mesa murders, an unsolved case involving the disappearance and murder of 11 women and a fetus whose remains were found on the outskirts of Albuquerque a decade after they were buried. She was 17 when the bodies were discovered.

Her parents, whom she described as hippies, never set a curfew and didn’t always shield her from life. Her mother was a sex educator before becoming an HIV epidemiologist — Gatwood remembers having a stuffed animal in the shape of the chlamydia virus and knowing about HIV when she was 5 — and her father, who according to Gatwood resembles Ted Bundy, was a middle-school teacher from whom she inherited her emotional nature.

Her father, Byron Gatwood, said she was fixated on language early on. “She was very interested always in the dynamics of relationships. The idea of how people get along and what the rules are, whether they’re written or not,” he said.

“Life of the Party” is largely a memoir, with memories of friendship as well as violence. In “Mans/Laughter,” Gatwood shares, among other things, the sexual harassment she endured from her boss while working at a bakery in high school. Her book doesn’t mention that as a 15-year-old, she organized other women who had been victimized and reported the bakery to the EEOC. She eventually received a settlement of more than $10,000.

“I encouraged her not to, I said they’re not going to do anything about it. And she, she plowed ahead totally on her own,” her mother, Jill Gatwood, said. “I thought it was good that she was standing up for herself.”

“Life of the Party” is also a meditation on Olivia Gatwood’s obsession with the true crime genre and her long-running fear of male violence. “I’ve always been really afraid of men. I think that’s really rational for a young girl to feel that way,” she said.

Living in a ground-floor apartment in Boston prompted much of the work in the book. In an author’s note that details her many sleepless nights, she writes: “I was afraid of something very specific: a man climbing through my first-floor apartment window, which realistically could have been popped open with a butter knife, and strangling me in my bed.” After she finished writing it, she said, she slept her first full night by herself.

Melissa Lozada-Oliva, a poet who hosts the podcast “Say More” with Gatwood and who said they first bonded over the gaps in their front teeth, said that she knew Gatwood struggled with the book. That was partly because, Lozada-Oliva said, Gatwood sought in her writing to address “her privilege as a white woman — acknowledging who gets to talk about violence and who gets to talk about violence being inflicted on them.”

During the Brooklyn performance, Gatwood was greeted with roaring applause when she read “Ode to My Bitch Face,” which is just what it sounds like, and “Ode to the Women of Long Island” (“who / when I show them the knife I carry in my purse / tell me it’s not big enough”). Afterward, she spent more than an hour signing books and getting to know some of the teenage girls and young women who came.

Mary Cornwell and Abigail Buchholz, a mother and daughter who drove five hours from Virginia, were among them. Buchholz first discovered Gatwood’s work on YouTube and shared it with Cornwell, who said the poems resonated with her as both a woman and a mother. “It’s beautiful and relevant to all generations,” she said.

At the beginning of Gatwood’s writing career, she wanted her audience to be “misogynistic men on the internet,” the people who perhaps needed to hear her work the most.

After many death and rape threats, she shifted her focus.

“It’s less important to me to change the minds of the people who want me dead,” Gatwood said. “And more important that I make girls feel less alone.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .