We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kaniz Hossain a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kaniz, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

There’s a bit of a journey before we get to the name of my platform, so let’s see how short and sweet I can keep it. I’ve been writing poetry for more than half my life now but it started as a hobby for me at 12, in my middle school social studies class. Since then, I only ever shared a few of my poems with my closest friends, and everything else was hidden away in a poetry journal. Fast forward to a few years later, I was 18 when I performed at my very first open mic during my freshman year of college. The love I felt in the auditorium every semester that I went back to perform sparked a want in me to do it more often, but I was clueless on where to find open mics outside of campus.

Ironically, things didn’t begin for me until the world stopped. When the pandemic began in 2020 and everything shut down, like everyone else, I was yearning for connection and community and just being around people. Something in me felt called to start sharing my writing with the world, and I created the ‘awkwardly.khaotic’ Instagram, my poetry persona. Khaotic became my stage name and after performing consistently when the world reopened, I was quickly being recognized within the creative community as such.

When I started getting the idea to start curating my own creative events, I struggled for a little bit on a name that felt right. I wanted it to spin off ‘Khaotic’, but in a way that didn’t feel cliche or punny. It didn’t click until I was at my older sister’s house, and her kids were running circles around us both with their zoomies. She made a remark about living in a “house of chaos”, and it felt like synergy when I heard it. Everything that I had created, everything that I planned on creating – it was all coming from a house of khaos, except the one that I lived in. I just needed to learn how to channel that properly, for myself and for the community I was trying to cultivate. And I wanted to have a space where people felt comfortable alchemizing whatever chaos they may be experiencing in their own lives.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

A little bit about myself – I’m a Bengali American woman who grew up in New York City. I’m a Pisces poet, so by default, all of my poems are love poems. I’ve inherited a bit of a green thumb from my father and currently have ten plant babies thriving in my little Brooklyn bedroom. And I think I’ll always own more books than I’ve actually read because there’s so much I always want to be reading, but somehow never enough time.

I’ve spent my life surrounded by so much culture and in turn, it’s led me down the path of growing into a poet, a published author, a visual artist, an educator, and so much more that is rooted in community. Since the start of my journey in 2020, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect and recognize how much of my success as a creative so far is because of the genuine support that I’ve received from the people I share space with. It fueled a desire in me to pay that forward, and I knew I just wanted to help other people tell their stories.

I offer individual services like peer editing services for writers who’d like constructive feedback before submitting their poems for publications/contests, and beta reading for writers working on a manuscript. I’m also a community curator, so I host monthly open mic events, multidisciplinary showcases, and writing workshops. So essentially, I offer personalized support if someone would like to work with me 1:1, and I offer community support if someone just needs a safe space to just be for the moment.

When it comes to me, my writing, the platform I’ve been building in the last two years, I’m most proud of the fact that I listened to my intuition – to that inner creative voice that pushed me ahead of my fear and ahead of the “what if’s” so I could give the life of an artist an honest shot. I want people to know that I’ve embraced my khaos, and it is in doing so that I’m able to provide spaces where people feel safe enough to accept their own. I work hard to make sure that the platform remains a place of honesty, integrity, and care. People can feel comfortable knowing that their voices will be heard, and they will be respected.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

The first thing I’ve ever sold to people was my limited-edition chapbook titled, Plucking Petals of Poetry. As a self-published venture, I gave up the privilege of having a team of people to help publish the book and did almost everything myself – finding a manufacturer, paying for production costs, personalizing the customer experience by hand wrapping the books in a really unique way. And I decided to publish only 50 copies since that particular project was meant to be a prequel to my full length manuscript, Blooming Beyond the Boundaries.

I have to admit, as a growing business and as an entrepreneur, I was (and still am) a lot more lax with my marketing than I should be. I didn’t have extensive roll outs, ad campaigns, or anything like that. Most of it stems from not having the mental bandwidth to be on social media fighting with an algorithm to get onto people’s feeds. But another layer of it is that I don’t want to be so caught up in curating content, that I lose the will to have fun with being creative.

With my book, I shared my behind the scenes process in real time through Instagram stories and just chatted before/after my performances at open mics to spread the word that I was bringing a new creation into the world. Even in that though, I worried that 50 copies would be too many to publish and that there was no way there would be that many people who wanted to have my poems on their bookshelf. The universe, on the other hand, disagreed. I released Plucking Petals of Poetry in February of 2022, and in less than a day, I sold out of all 50 copies. It was the most surreal feeling ever – to go from putting the book together in draft, to receiving the physical copies in my hand, to then giving them back to 50 different corners of the world. The whole experience truly set me up with more confidence to continue working towards the full project, Blooming Beyond the Boundaries.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

There’s a few rewarding feelings that come with being an artist, and none of them are monetary. For me, there’s so much fulfillment in knowing that I’ve just created something. Whether that’s a poem, a mixed media collage piece, a watercolor or acrylic painting…there’s a huge sense of relief that comes with getting the art out of your mind and your heart and putting it in a tangible, physical space instead. It’s also extremely gratifying to hear when my work inspires or comforts someone else. There’s so much fear that comes from putting my art out into the world – I don’t want to be judged, I don’t want to be rejected, and I definitely don’t want to feel like it’s not up to a certain artistic standard or caliber. But that inner voice is immediately silenced as soon as someone says that they see themselves somewhere in my writing, or that they feel moved to get their own story out in some way. And if my artistry can help someone else hone their own creative voice, then I feel like I’ve honored my purpose as an artist myself.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @awkwardly.khaotic / @houseofkhaos_