28 Days of Black Women Authors

Compiled by: P a t t i D i g h , www.pattidigh.com

For Black History Month 2018, each day I posted information about a Black Woman Author so we can all diversify our reading lists.

Here is the full month compiled into one document.

Happy reading!

If you are interested in reading and thinking in community about issues that matter, consider joining the Hard Conversations Book Club, which meets online monthly to discuss a book that will challenge, educate, inspire, and/or motivate you.

You may also be interested in the online course, Hard Conversations: An Introduction to Racism.

2 February 1 – Toi Derricotte

"Joy is an act of resistance." -Toi Derricotte

It's Black History Month. Every day this month, I will celebrate a Black Woman Author so we can all diversify our reading lists. I'm starting with one of my favorite people in the world, poet Toi Derricotte. Toi won a special National Book Award in 2016 for co-founding Cave Canem, a collective of Black poets that serves to remedy the under-representation and isolation of African American poets in Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs and writing workshops across the United States.

Toi is not only a fine poet but also an extraordinary human. She spoke at Life is a Verb Camp last year and won everyone's heart for the truth in her poems, and also for her laugh, her teaching, and her deep humanity.

Passing By Toi Derricotte

A professor invites me to his “Black Lit” class; they’re When he didn’t speak, the man reading Larson’s Passing. One of the black would look up at my father’s face. students says, “Sometimes light-skinned blacks “What did he write?” think they can fool other blacks, my father quizzed me. but I can always tell,” looking right through me. After I tell them I am black, I ask the class, “Was I passing when I was just sitting here, before I told you?” A white woman shakes her head desperately, as if I had deliberately deceived her. She keeps examining my face, then turning away as if she hopes I’ll disappear. Why presume “passing” is based on what I leave out and not what she fills in? In one scene in the book, in a restaurant, she’s “passing,” though no one checked her at the door— “Hey, you black?” My father, who looked white, told me this story: every year when he’d go to get his driver’s license, the man at the window filling out the form would ask, “White or black?” pencil poised, without looking up. My father wouldn’t pass, but he might use silence to trap a devil.

3 February 2 – Claudia Rankine

Have you ever read a book that just stops you where you are? That opens a world for you in a way you could not imagine? For me, one of those books is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.

Claudia Rankine's numerous awards and honors include the 2014 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, as well as a 2014 Lannan Foundation Literary Award. In 2005, she was awarded the Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets. She is a 2016 United States Artist Zell Fellow and a 2016 MacArthur Fellow.

Her most recent work, the book-length poem, Citizen: An American Lyric, won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Award,[1] the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award[2] in Poetry (the first book in the award’s history to be nominated in both poetry and criticism), the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, the 2015 NAACP Image Award in poetry, the 2015 PEN Open Book Award, the 2015 PEN American Center USA Literary Award, the 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award and the 2015 VIDA Literary Award. Citizen was also a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award and was the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize. Citizen holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category.

But mostly? It will change your life.

From Citizen: “You are in the dark, in the car...” By Claudia Rankine

You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there. You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.

Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.

As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.

/

2

When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.

When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.

He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say.

Now there you go, he responds.

The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile.

/

A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. And yes, you want it to stop, you want the black child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet and be brushed off, not brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.

The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers.

/

The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.

At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?

It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.

I am so sorry, so, so sorry.

3 February 3 – Patricia Smith

“Every woman begins as weather.” -Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.”She is a 2014 Guggenheim fellow, a 2012 fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo, a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, recipient of a Lannan fellowship and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history.

She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (2017), winner of an NAACP Image Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press.

A four-time individual champion on the National Poetry Slam—the most successful slammer in the competition’s history—Smith has also been a featured poet on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and has performed three one-woman plays, one produced by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. She has performed around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Poets Stage in Stockholm, Rotterdam’s Poetry International Festival, the Aran Islands International Poetry and Prose Festival, the Bahia Festival, the Schomburg Center, the Sorbonne in Paris and on tour in Germany, Austria, and Holland. She has done hundreds of writing and performance residencies in elementary, middle schools, and high schools, shelters and prisons.

FINDING HIS FIST Interviewing Nelson Mandela, April 1994 By Patricia Smith

I want to scream into the hearing aid nestled in his ear, Where is your fist? Thick-throated men in black coats scurry to the windows of the suite, scour the landscape with slitted eyes, estimate the arc of bullets. They move me from one chair to another to another until I am sitting so close his breath sparks moisture on my skin. The pink contraption, imitating another flesh, fills his ear and I want to startle, to prickle his composure, but I see that he is not nearly the vapor I imagined. I assumed his body would be temporary, with fingers, an ear,

4 an arm misting into nothing at odd intervals, a leg folding into dust, his smile its own backdrop, the repeating escape of the recently caged. He smooths a wrinkle in his gray suit, grins sheepishly, leans forward waiting for a question. I stare at his fist resting on the table, ask with my whole mouth. He hears me perfectly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=Jyanmty15fA

5 February 4 – Glenis Redmond

“Poetry is the mouth that speaks, when all other mouths are silent.” - Glenis Redmond

What are the words I can use to describe poet Glenis Redmond? Powerful, graceful, truthful, and so many other “ful” words. Glenis has spoken at my Life is a Verb Camp twice now, and never fails to bring down the house. Why? Because she is a truth-teller, a seer, a force of nature. She is an Imagination Activist, a phrase I love.

Her first book is titled, Backbone. She has two CDs: Monumental and Glenis on Poetry (an interview that aired on NPR.) Her latest book of poetry is titled Under the Sun published by Main Street Rag.

Glenis is the Poet-in-Resident at The Peace Center for the Performing Arts, and the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She makes her home in Charlotte, NC, Greenville, South Carolina and the road.

Glenis is grounded in many worlds: Poetry, The Teaching Arts and Imagination Activism. As a Poet, her feet are firmly planted on both the page and the stage. As a Teaching Artist, her educational reach extends into the classroom, where she teaches both students and teachers to open to their own poetry within. As a Spiritual Activist she uses the bright bloom of her heart and soul to unlock the doors of creativity in others.

Learn more about Glenis here: http://www.glenisredmond.com | https://vimeo.com/195509331

Bruised By Glenis Redmond

They banter back and forth like boys do: You charcoal, son. You so black you purple. I tell them, hol’up in defense of my mahogany skin and the boy they’re putting down. I say, You know what they say? In cue as if we rehearsed it, we both chime, the darker the berry, the sweeter the juice. We flash twin smiles. There’s a moment when the air gets less complicated in the room. The space is large enough for me to ask, why y’all hate on each other so hard?

Oh, he? He my boy. See, that’s how we show love. They crush so hard I want to weep – 6 I’m so tired of everybody being gangsta hard, but they are being real. I know ‘cause I got 3 brothers and growin up I never saw them show love, except in that one on one — man on man dunk in yo face. Call you ignant ten times a day kind of way. Their talk swags like their walk. I follow the conversation as it dips and drags. We end up talking about how we were punished as kids.

I lead with, I’m from the South and ya’ll don’t know nothin about a switch — havin to go ‘round back fetch your own hickory, the same stick use to beat you. I say these words and I still feel the sting of the switch. See welts raising into an angry language of graffiti on my skin. One says, don’t bring back no skinny one neither. I shake my head in solidarity–the blood we’ve spilled makes us kin. Another boys says, what about those belts? I hear my mama’s beating cadence, a belt whip with every word, I–told–you–not — to…

Another says, extension cord. I’m brought fully awake, cause I don’t know nothing ‘bout that kind of whippin. We only heard of Cedric down the street gettin beat like that. Then, we did not know the word, Abuse or the phrase Child Protective Services. We just said his mama was MEAN.

Jicante, another says, I say huh? Rice. You kneel on raw rice for hours. We walk down alleys; I listen as they go deeper into the shadows farther than I have ever been, but we don’t skip a beat. We laugh – joke about our beatings and nobody mentions

7 the pain, but it’s all understood – we are all battered. We bump up against each other’s wounds before we brainstorm. I pick up the marker and they bicker blue versus red. I read between the gang signs. It is not lost on me, that when these colors mingle, they make purple. I muse in my mind how violence for them still continues. I come back to the poem, that we are here to write; the ones that saved my life. I know this detour we took down old roads is a place we had to go, places where we have been loved so hard it hurts, so hard we are still bruised. We bear our scars, then we pick up our pens and write.

8 February 5 – Sonya Renee Taylor

“Our society tells us fatness is not beautiful. Blackness is not beautiful. So even while reclaiming size diversity as beautiful, the presence of Blackness complicates the narrative...It is this unwillingness to wade through the murky waters of race that make Black and Brown women invisible even in the places where we say we are trying to make people seen." -Sonya Renee Taylor

Sonya Renee Taylor is not only a poet and spoken word artist, but also the creator of the The Body Is Not An Apology Movement, a movement is about fostering "global, radical, unapologetic self love which translates to radical human love and action in service toward a more just, equitable and compassionate world.”

I was pleased to host her in 2015 as a keynote speaker for my Life is a Verb Camp, where she got a standing ovation because of her presence, her words, her vision, her truth. Sonya Renee Taylor has won multiple National and International poetry slams, including the 2004 U.S. National Individual Poetry Slam competition, the 2005 DC/Baltimore Grand Slam competition, the 2007 Ill List III Slam competition, the 2006 Four Continents International Slam competition and has performed for audiences across the US, New Zealand, Australia, England, Scotland, Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands, including in prisons, mental health treatment facilities, homeless shelters, universities, festivals and public schools across the globe. She is an African-American woman who identifies as queer.

In her work, Taylor sets out telling a story that makes the reader or listener wonder and question about the meaning of the work, challenging their understanding of the themes or topics they just took in. She has written articles about the intersections of race and gender on the topic of body positivity, critiquing the current ideas society has around the movement, making it more inclusive and claiming space for those who have been noticeably left out of the conversation.

A Poem For The Girl Who Solicited Money To Get To the National Poetry Slam (I assume by plane) Because ”I am only 20 and I am a white girl, so I don’t think I should be riding the Greyhound by myself all the way out there.” By Sonya Renee Taylor

A man with fecal matter in his tight fist-ed naps speaks in Pentecostal tongues and expletives. Proclaims through the acrid stench of three day human sweat, the kind one can only acquire on a cross country greyhound bus ride, that he is going to hold this bus hostage. Stands in front of the door like a Buckingham palace guard and states in the only coherent syntax he has offered in the last 40 minutes, “Ain’t A MUTHAFUCKA GETTIN OF THIS GOD DAMNED BUS!” 9 “Ain’t A MUTHAFUCKA GETTIN OF THIS GOD DAMNED BUS!” The first thing I thought was, “Thank God I am not a white girl. This would be soooooo scary for her!”

Let me say love, I am sure you didn’t mean it you know, “that way”, the way that reminds us crackly black breeder girls that we ain’t ever really known danger nor discomfort. OR Perhaps we know it just well enough. The way you know the taste of a rapist spit in your mouth so translucently familiar it doesn’t really make you heave anymore when you swallow. So swallow.

Certain it was an of 18th century slip of tongue . Cellular memory that made you believe somehow your precious pallid safety is of such global concern that our wallets might gladly lay themselves prostrate at the foot of your pretty toes than sooner see them sludge through the swamp of junkies, jailbirds and shitty ass diapers, right? Greyhound is for…poor people, …..old people, …….brown people … lesser people. Not prized little white girls.

After all, America’s flag is woven with the fabric of your frilly pearly panties and we will not have them soiled so of course you should not ride the greyhound beside my grandmother, an E.R nurse for 25 years on her way to visit her first born grandson. She might tell you has broken matchstick legs but

12 she’s been praying God will make them straight as his word. She might tell you her son just joined the Navy. That the thought of war makes her stomach knot like the rubber bands her brother ties around his arms since he got back from that Vietnam.” She might just offer you some chicken she fried up for the trip and we wouldn’t want to unsettle your delicate alabaster belly .

God forbid you have to hear about Liza. About her 6 month sentence for writing that 100 dollar bad check for groceries. She might tell you that she can’t find her youngest since foster care took him. Juan might show you a picture of his daughter. He is saving for her Quinceanera, you know. A migrant worker might tell you he travels on Mondays but manages to make that 22 hour bus ride home in time for Saturday Huevos Rancheros with his wife and three children.

Oh sweet baby jesus, someone might ask you to listen to something other than a poem; Than yourself. No sweet young white woman should have to endure that.

Your safety is an American Institution. A castle built on the backs of greyhound riding brown and black folks who carry the bricks back and forth across U.S interstates so you never have to break a sweat, a nail. Never have to worry if looking like every other black male will mistakenly land you in prison. If forgetting your papers will land you in an illegal alien detention center. If today you will be a maid or a whore or a poor welfare mother cause those are the only people who should ever ride the bus.

13 So yes love, There are a million open wallets waiting to usher you away from the blight of poverty. Away from what those not pale or privileged enough for pricey plane tickets or public pandering already know and trust. You, my dear, will get wherever it is you need to go in comfort and in safety, because you have always been more than willing to leave the danger and the driving to us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7lKPdh_y-8

14 February 6 – Toni Morrison

“…the oldest and most devastating pain there is: not the pain of childhood, but the remembrance of it.” - Toni Morrison, Sula

It's Black History Month. Every day this month, I will celebrate a Black Woman Author so we can all diversify our reading lists.

What do you get when you put the themes of female friendship, the Black American experience in the 20th Century, family, love, jealousy, sex, and betrayal and put them in the hands of a brilliant, lauded writer? You get Toni Morrison’s Sula.

Before she won the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison was an employee at Random House with one novel under her belt. That’s when she wrote Sula, a novel that blew me over and made me quiet when I first read it in college. Nominated for the National Book Award, Sula tells the story of a friendship between two Black women: Nel and Sula. The book offers a painful and beautiful commentary on the lives of Black Americans and the hardships wrought by racism, on issues of gender, on the relationships between mothers and daughters, and on the ways men and women relate to each other. Mostly, it changes you.

On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Toni Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

From Sula:

“In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.” ― Toni Morrison, Sula

13 February 7 – Angie Thomas

“That's the problem. We let people say stuff, and they say it so much that it becomes okay to them and normal for us. What's the point of having a voice if you're gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?” ― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

There is a Young Adult novel that has been sitting on the top of the NYTimes bestseller list since it was published a year ago, and with good reason. Angie Thomas’ debut novel introduces us to a world that dives deep into race, voice, relationships, home, police brutality, and activism, among other issues. The novel is also deeply rooted in modern culture and follows a protagonist drawn to activism after she witnesses the police shooting of her unarmed friend.

Compelling, richly drawn characters that I cared about are a hallmark of Thomas’ work. Hers is a fresh new voice not afraid to tell her truth and the truths of many young people of color--and those around them.

Shaken by the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant, Thomas initially developed the project as a short story for her senior project in Belhaven University’s creative writing program. While writing the short story, the project quickly expanded, though Thomas temporarily put it aside after graduation; speaking to Ebony, Thomas noted the emotional strain of the subject matter. But the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland drew Thomas back to expand the project into a novel, which she titled after Tupac Shakur's "THUG LIFE" concept: "The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody.”

This is a book to read and share, not only with young adults, but with everyone. Yes, there is a film coming out based on the novel, but enjoy her language in the book first.

From The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

“Right. Lack of opportunities," Daddy says. "Corporate America don't bring jobs to our communities, and they damn sure ain't quick to hire us. Then, shit, even if you do have a high school diploma, so many of the schools in our neighborhoods don't prepare us well enough. That's why when your momma talked about sending you and your brothers to Williamson, I agreed. Our schools don't get the resources to equip you like Williamson does. It's easier to find some crack that it is the find a good school around here.

"Now, think 'bout this," he says. "How did the drugs even get in our neighborhood? This is a multibillion- dollar industry we talking 'bout, baby. That shit is flown into our communities, but I don't know anybody with a private jet. Do you?" "No."

14 "Exactly. Drugs come from somewhere, and they're destroying our community," he says. "You got folks like Brenda, who think they need them survive, and then you got the Khalils, who think they need to sell them to survive. The Brendas can't get jobs unless they're clean, and they can't pay for rehab unless they got jobs. When the Khalils get arrested for selling drugs, they either spend most of their life in prison, another billion-dollar industry, or they have a hard time getting a real job and probably start selling drugs again. That's the hate they're giving us, baby, a system designed against us. That's Thug Life.”

15 February 8 – Phillis Wheatley

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung, Whence flow these wishes for the common good, By feeling hearts alone best understood, I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast? Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d: Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway? -Phillis Wheatley, "To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth”

Phillis Wheatley was the first published African-American female poet. Born in West Africa, she was kidnapped from her parents and sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America. She was purchased by the Wheatley family of Boston, who taught her to read and write and encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.

The Wheatleys' 18-year-old daughter, Mary, first tutored Phillis in reading and writing. Their son Nathaniel also helped her. John Wheatley’s family gave Phillis an unprecedented education for an enslaved person, and for a female of any race. Wheatley learned to read and write English by the age of nine; by the age of 12, Phillis was reading Greek and Latin classics and difficult passages from the Bible, and she began writing poetry at thirteen, modeling her work on the English poets of the time, particularly John Milton, Thomas Gray, and Alexander Pope. At the age of 14, she wrote her first poem, "To the University of Cambridge, in New England." Recognizing her literary ability, the Wheatley family supported Phillis's education and left the household labor to their other domestic slaves.

I am left with the deep knowing that many other slaves had talents like those of Phillis Wheatley and their talents were squandered, left to rot on the vine.

In 1773, at the age of 20, Phillis accompanied Nathaniel Wheatley to London in part for her health, but also because Susanna believed she would have a better chance publishing her book of poems there. That same year, Wheatley was emancipated by the Wheatley family shortly after her book, Poems on Subjects Religious and Moral, was published in London. In 1779, Wheatley submitted a proposal for a second volume of poems, but was unable to publish it because of her financial circumstances, the loss of patrons after her emancipation, and the Revolutionary War. Her husband John Peters was improvident, and imprisoned for debt in 1784, leaving an impoverished Wheatley with a sickly infant son. She went to work as a scullery maid at a boarding house to support them, a kind of domestic labor that she had not been accustomed to, even before becoming a free person. Wheatley died alone in a boarding house on December 5, 1784, at the age of 31.

16

To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works By Phillis Wheatley

To show the lab’ring bosom’s deep intent, Calm and serene thy moments glide along, And thought in living characters to paint, And may the muse inspire each future song! When first thy pencil did those beauties give, Still, with the sweets of contemplation bless’d, And breathing figures learnt from thee to live, May peace with balmy wings your soul invest! How did those prospects give my soul delight, But when these shades of time are chas’d away, A new creation rushing on my sight? And darkness ends in everlasting day, Still, wond’rous youth! each noble path pursue; On what seraphic pinions shall we move, On deathless glories fix thine ardent view: And view the landscapes in the realms above? Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fire, There shall thy tongue in heav’nly murmurs flow, To aid thy pencil and thy verse conspire! And there my muse with heav’nly transport glow; And may the charms of each seraphic theme No more to tell of Damon’s tender sighs, Conduct thy footsteps to immortal fame! Or rising radiance of Aurora’s eyes; High to the blissful wonders of the skies For nobler themes demand a nobler strain, Elate thy soul, and raise thy wishful eyes. And purer language on th’ ethereal plain. Thrice happy, when exalted to survey Cease, gentle Muse! the solemn gloom of night That splendid city, crown’d with endless day, Now seals the fair creation from my sight. Whose twice six gates on radiant hinges ring: Celestial Salem blooms in endless spring.

17 February 9 - Phoebe Robinson

"With Black hair, there's a whole community of shared experience that many outside of the Black community do not understand. It's because black women know that the quality of their life and how others will treat them is riding on the presentation of their hair." Phoebe Robinson, You Can’t Touch My Hair and Other Things I Still Have to Explain

“When you are a person of color in this country, you learn early on that you cannot fall apart every time something racially-charged happens to you. You just have to be resilient or you won’t survive.” - Phoebe Robinson, You Can’t Touch My Hair and Other Things I Still Have to Explain

As Edgar Gomez wrote in his review of You Can’t Touch My Hair in the LA Review of Books, “Can I touch your hair?” is only a question insofar as it demands people of color to ask themselves why their bodies are something to marvel, and, by extension, what their novelty is in direct opposition to.” “The book,” he continues, “reads more like a conversation than a set of essays — one that she and many other people of color are sick of having.”

Robinson wades through the fascination white people have with how people of color, and specifically black women, present their bodies. She confronts critical subjects like the historical representations of black hair in media, problematic casting calls for people of color, and which member of U2 she’d like to sleep with in descending order of hotness. In other words, this is not a definitive tome on race and hair politics, nor is it trying to be. It is clear that Robinson’s comedy background is at the forefront of the collection. If she is going to have to have this conversation, she is going to do it on her own terms. Her urge to shift the focus away from a white-centric dialogue is central to the collection.

A stand-up comic in addition to being an author, Robinson is known for co-hosting the hit podcast 2 Dope Queenswith Jessica Williams, as well as its solo spin-off, Sooo Many White Guys, devoted to highlighting the voices of women, people of color, and LGBTQ writers and performers in the entertainment industry. In You Can’t Touch My Hair, she turns the microphone on herself, exploring the ways she has navigated her self-image throughout her life. Readers of color may find their own stories echoed in Robinson’s essay about being forced into an educator role for white people.

People of color are not just educational opportunities for white people; they are fully realized people. In this book, Robinson challenges the ways we are conditioned to talk about race. You Can’t Touch My Hair is less a response to an invasion of privacy than a demand that black complexity be celebrated.

18 From You Can’t Touch My Hair and Other Things I Still Have to Explain By Phoebe Robinson

“Believe me, it’s not something I necessarily want to do. I don’t wake up every day going, ‘Aaah! Time to break down institutional racism to people before Kathie Lee and Hoda drink their body weight in Franzia and host the fourth hour of the TODAY show.’ Honestly, I would be just fine spending my time finally perfecting the dance breakdown from Janet Jackson’s ‘If’ music video or finally taking an art history course just for funsies or, you know, enjoying the luxury of being a multilayered person like white dudes are allowed to be, but that’s just not how things are.”

19 February 10 - Eve Louise Ewing

“Ever since black people came to this country we have needed a Moses. There has always been so much water that needs parting. It seems like all black children, from the time we are born, come into the world in the midst of a rushing current that threatens to swallow us whole if we don't heed the many, many warnings we are told to heed. We come into the world as alchemists of the water, bending it, willing it to bear us safe passage and cleanse us along the way, to teach us to move with joy and purpose and to never, ever stop flowing forward into something grand waiting at the other end of the delta. We're a people forever in exodus.

Before Moses there was Abraham, and ever since black people came to this country we have needed an Abraham. We have always been sending each other away -- for our own good, don't you know it -- and calling each other back, finding kinship where a well springs from tears. We are masters of the art of sacrifice; no one is more skilled at laying their greatest beloveds on the altar and feeling certainty even as we feel sorrow. And when we see the ram, we know how to act fast, and prosper, even as the stone knife warms in our hands.”

― Eve L. Ewing, Electric Arches

Dr. Eve Louise Ewing is an academic, American scholar, writer and visual artist from Chicago. She is a sociologist of education at the University of Chicago with research focused on racism, social inequality, and urban policy, and the impact of these forces on American public schools and the lives of young people. Her book Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism & School Closings on Chicago's South Side is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in October 2018 and explores the relationship between the closing of public schools and the structural history of race and racism in Chicago's Bronzeville community.

Dr. Ewing is also an essayist and poet. Her first collection of poetry, essays, and visual art, Electric Arches, was published in fall 2017, and she co-edited the fiction anthology, Beyond Ourselves. You can find her work in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Washington Post, and many other publications. She co-directs Crescendo Literary, a partnership that develops community- engaged arts events and educational resources as a form of cultural organizing.

She has been an educator in both traditional and community-based settings, including Chicago Public Schools, After School Matters, Harvard University, and Wellesley College. Dr. Ewing currently is an instructor for the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, a visual arts and humanities project that connects teaching artists and scholars to men at Stateville Maximum Security Prison through classes, workshops, and guest lectures.

Dr. Ewing completed her doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is a force to be reckoned with. As Chicago Magazine put it, “ignore Eve Ewing at your own intellectual, political, and cultural peril.”

Electric Arches is an exploration of black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Ewing imagines familiar figures in 1990s Chicago but in magical or surreal 20 circumstances--blues legend Koko Taylor is a tale-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects--hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook--as precious icons.

Shea Butter Manifesto By Eve L Ewing

We, the forgotten delta people. The dry riverbed people, Hair calling always for rain, Skin turned skyward wishing for clouds, We stand for blood. We kneel for water. For oil, we lay down, Fingers spread, as if in this way We might skate across the yellow clay of it all Like lagoon insects.

So it is written: Heal yourself, baby. With the tree and the touch, with the turmeric. In this world, nothing brittle prevails, So in this world, grease ia a compliment, No it’s a weapon, No, it’s a dream you had, where it was cold And your mother, seeing the threat of gray at your elbows And knowing that ash is the language of the dead Knelt, and put her hands on your face like this And anointed you a protected child, a hot iron in a place of frost. Recall this, and Fear no thickness. Be resurrected, glistening in the story of you. Be shining.

21 February 11 – Aja Monet

"I was a woman ahead of her time. I shimmered in the scars. I live in the bloodline. I imagine more than broken families. I come from the laughter as aspiring lovers, the lure of trembling in another's arms. What about what I wanted?" -Aja Monet, "What My Grandmother Meant to Say Was"

Aja Monet is an internationally known poet, educator, and musician of Cuban-Jamaican descent from Brooklyn, NY. She is known to be the youngest poet to have ever become the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Champion at the age of 19 in 2007 and is the last woman to have won this title since. Monet is also known for her activist work, and has been an active participant of the Say Her Name campaign, which has highlighted police brutality against black women

Monet has performed her work across the U.S., the U.K., France, and many other countries. Currently a teaching artist and mentor for the New York-based youth organization, Urban Word NYC, her work has been published in my publications, including her books, The Black Unicorn Sings (2010), the anthology, Chorus: A Literary Mixtape (2012), and Inner City Chants and Cyborg Cyphers (2015).

how we see ourselves is determined by five western countries five of which determine value by how well they kill others. and we out here screaming black lives matter… i am starting to believe that this is all we value is each other’s death more than life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC8bKd4R3oo

22 February 12 – Safia Elhillo

“For so long, I wasn’t seeing my particular intersections of experience represented in the literature I was reading, and this sometimes made me feel like I didn’t exist. The more we make our stories public, the more we have a record that we existed, the more we can continue to dispel the obsolete notion that only old white men have experiences deserving of literature. The obstacle, in having so few previous examples of stories like ours, is feeling like we are starting from scratch in creating this record, and feeling tokenized and treated as a representative of our communities at large.” -Safia Elhillo

The author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Safia Elhillo is a Sudanese-American poet born in 1990. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, she received a BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and an MFA in poetry at the New School. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee, receiving a special mention for the 2016 Pushcart Prize, and recipient of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize and the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation, and Crescendo Literary and The Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Incubator.

Safia’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Japanese, Estonian, Portuguese, and Greek. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).

Safia has shared her work on platforms such as TEDxNewYork, Under Armour’s “Unlike Any” campaign, the South African State Theatre, the New Amsterdam Theater on Broadway, and TV1’s Verses & Flow. She was a founding member of Slam NYU, the 2012 and 2013 national collegiate championship team, and was a three-time member and former coach of the DC Youth Slam Poetry team.

Men Follow Me By Safia Elhillo on instagram on twitter home from the subway station through my front door over the years wait for me to turn eighteen with their eyes with their cars with their children in the backseat in the empty parking lot the echo of footsteps giving them hundreds of bodies with their tongue out 23 with their teeth shining like flies after I pay my fare & exit their taxi into the bathroom into the elevator maybe even when I die & step away from my mottled body i will look back to see them still one hand hot against their groin the other reaching for my hair.

Safia Elhillo’s poem for Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn as part of Under Armour ad campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=maSCeWF424k

24 February 13 – Alysia Harris

“People are like words. Each has its own purpose. Each has an inner and outer life, a life of thought, interpretation, composition and a life of action. I have made my life about words in hopes of making it about people. I want to talk to you about pain. I want to talk to you about beauty. I want to talk to you about guilt, faith, failure. I want to talk to you about joy with the wish that we may experience a little more of it here.” - Alysia Harris

Alysia Nicole Harris was born in Fremont, California, but grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, and considers herself on all accounts a member of the ranks of great Southern woman. As a child, she was most fascinated by language and would scribble stories about My Little Ponies and imaginary friends in her free time. At age 10 she wrote her first poem, after hearing about William Shakespeare in English class. That class began her life-long love of poetry and the literary arts.

After she graduated high school, Alysia moved to Philly to begin her undergraduate career at The University of Pennsylvania where she studied linguistics, with a focus on Arabic, Russian, Old English and nonstandard English varieties. It was doing her time in Philly that she became involved with spoken word and joined the Excelano Project, UPENN's spoken word collective.

Here she experienced her first success as a writer and a performer as a member of the winning 2007 CUPSI and Brave New Voices Teams. In 2008 she featured on the HBO documentary: Brave New Voices where she wowed audiences with her piece "That Girl". After spending a semester abroad in Egypt and after extensive amounts of time traveling across the Middle East, through Turkey, Jordan, and Syria, in 2010 Alysia graduated UPENN Summa Cum Laude with honors. She was also inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.

In 2014 Alysia received her MFA in poetry from NYU and is currently a PhD candidate in linguistics at Yale University where she is a Bouchet Honor Society Graduate Fellow. Although she has experienced scholastic success, poetry has always come first in her heart. Pushcart nominee, Cave Canem fellow, winner of the 2014 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize, finalist for the 2015 Pocataligo Poetry Prize, 2014 Edwin Markham and Joy Harjo prizes and finalist for the 2013 Indiana Review Prize, her poetry has appeared in Indiana Review, Catch & Release Columbia's Journal of Literature and Art, Solstice Literary Magazine, Squaw Valley Review, Letters Journal, Adanna Literary Journal, Print Oriented Bastards, and Vinyl Magazine among others. Her poem "When I Put My Hands in The Air It's Praise" was chosen for publication in The Break-beat Poets Anthology of New American Poetry during the age of Hip-Hop. She has toured nationally for the last 5 years and also performed at the United Nations, as well as in Canada, South Africa, Germany, Slovakia, and the UK.

25

Death Poem By Alysia Harris

There will come a day When the fear of death will be the favored joke Passed amongst corpses And they’re already laughing

My love, please don’t be afraid But there will come a day When field mice play in our empty sockets When our bones become homes for living creatures Other than our egos And when time will jostle our skeletons Out of the composition that is me and you And will write with us love letters that spell I owe you eternity

If we believe in life after death, then I often wonder why we assume the dead like coffins When people were never meant to live in boxes So I pray that our children will have the good sense to leave us a little wiggle room Leave us exposed like stray dogs in a thunderstorm And I will hear the breeze but I will not know it as the breeze And I will feel the rain but not know it as the rain And I will behold the sky but not know it as the sky

Instead, I will hear the breeze and think it is your laugh Returned into the hearth of my ear And I will feel the rain and think that it is the pinprick of your kiss and when the rain is tender I will know that something has softened you And when the rain is violent I will know that something has shaken you And, in this new found understanding Without eyes or ears or hands or lips Our bare bones will make love in the dirt;

26 Never knowing our nakedness Imagine, the wind coursing through a calligraphy of weeds

In our disrepair we have grown gardens of ourselves Sprouts of curious grass shooting from our eye sockets Our knuckles, hard, smooth skipping stones meant for children’s play And the devilish sun, picking its way through your missing teeth and neither of us can keep from smiling these days And the days go unnoticed and the nights go unslept And we talk with our souls through the holes in our ribs Where the organs once sat

Imagine, your skull and mine both reduced to grins Both washed clean of our sins and our skins, going young again, forgetting why we ever wrinkled or why we ever furrowed our brow with the plow of anger

Become dust with me Insignificant and everywhere For I will love you even after your marrow has become a whisper and your bones; Nothing but the snickering of gravel Let us soak in the spaces our shadows left behind Your skeleton, laced with mine I will tie your soul to my ankles And know what it is like to step into a dream

And you will try on my backbone and see how bad it hurt the day you said you were calling it quits I don’t remember why you left Or why you came back I don’t know how many years have passed I’m not really sure years passed at all

All I know is the rain falls; You kiss me like a rain fall

27 The sun, it bleaches us clear and every day is a romance All this to say; We are already laughing There is a wedding of earthworms and pebbles Waiting when our tuxedo skeletons no longer fit There is a place for our faces to lie planted beside Forever smiling There exists a place where we can still be in love There exists a place where we can be still and in love Just two gentle skulls https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=21&v=jyZuIP5x-tQ

28 February 14 – Lucille Clifton

“Poetry is a way of living in the world, and a way of trying to come to peace with the world. It’s not about answers, but about questions. You come to poetry not out of what you know, but what you wonder.” -Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton was an American poet, writer, and educator from Buffalo, New York. From 1979 to 1985 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. Clifton was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her first book of poems, Good Times (Random House, 1969), was rated one of the best books of the year by the New York Times.

Clifton remained employed in state and federal government positions until 1971, when she became a writer in residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore, Maryland, where she completed two collections: Good News About the Earth (Random House, 1972) and An Ordinary Woman (Random House, 1974).

She was the author of several other collections of poetry, including Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA Editions, 2000), which won the National Book Award; Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (BOA Editions, 1987), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Two-Headed Woman (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), also a Pulitzer Prize nominee as well as the recipient of the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize.

Clifton was also the author of Generations: A Memoir (Random House, 1976) and more than sixteen books for children, written expressly for an African-American audience.

Of her work, Rita Dove has written: “In contrast to much of the poetry being written today— intellectualized lyricism characterized by an application of inductive thought to unusual images—Lucille Clifton’s poems are compact and self-sufficient...Her revelations then resemble the epiphanies of childhood and early adolescence, when one’s lack of preconceptions about the self allowed for brilliant slippage into the metaphysical, a glimpse into an egoless, utterly thingful and serene world.”

Her honors include an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a Lannan Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shelley Memorial Award, the YM-YWHA Poetry Center Discovery Award, and the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize.

In 1999, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She served as Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland from 1979 to 1985, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Lucille Clifton died on February 13, 2010, at the age of seventy-three.

29 I’ve included Lucille Clifton on Valentine’s Day because she teaches us to love our big hips:

Homage to My Hips By Lucille Clifton

These hips are big hips. they need space to move around in. they don't fit into little petty places. these hips are free hips. they don't like to be held back. these hips have never been enslaved, they go where they want to go they do what they want to do. these hips are mighty hips. these hips are magic hips. i have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top

30 February 15 – Khadijah Queen

“My advice is to seek out and build a community that fully and positively supports you and your work, and offer the same support to others. We are in this together and we can do more if we understand that and operate under that assumption. I believe in community advocacy, I believe in Gwendolyn Brooks’ lines: ‘We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business.’ That said, if you’re in a toxic situation, please try to get out of it safely. Find real help and don’t give up until you find it. Persistence means to keep writing, yes, but it also means persistently caring for yourself so that you can write. We need your voices and your powers. Learn and keep learning how to use them.” -Khadijah Queen interview, advice to writers

Queen’s stunning fifth book, “I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On,” was published in 2017. As critic Hanif Abdurraqib writes, “The title is literal: The book is a collection of several short stories about Queen’s interactions with men, woven together into a single narrative. Though most of the men are famous—Arsenio Hall, Tupac, Montell Jordan—each encounter feels ordinary, familiar. This place, with these men, could be anywhere.”

In one story, the protagonist—Queen, we presume—is invited to work on a video shoot for a rapper from Long Beach. When the rapper makes an unwanted sexual advance, she refuses, prompting him to cuss her out. He “flashed cash stacks at me & got mad when I refused his proposal to kick it later all of a sudden I was a stuck-up bitch,” Queen writes. In another story, an older, well-known author not-so- subtly steals a look at Queen’s cleavage at a literary conference. When Queen catches him, he looks up and offers some professional advice: Keep writing, every day, he says. The encounter feels suffocating; the author’s wisdom seems innocent, on the surface, but also puzzling. Queen, by that point, is an accomplished writer, spending time at an event specifically dedicated to her craft. So why did he have the impulse to counsel her?

Many of the stories in “I’m So Fine” serve as a testimony to the burdens that come, in this world, with existing in a woman’s body. Numerous moments are unsurprising, but no less infuriating for that. Others are more quietly devastating. On a date with a former N.F.L. player, Queen tells him that she would like to take things slow, and they agree not to call each other ever again. In all of the stories, Queen builds in a closeness with details—clothing, geography, smells and sounds. Each anecdote is funny until it isn’t, specific until it is everywhere.

In a poem describing the time her mother saw Harry Belafonte and Eartha Kitt, Queen writes, “A few weeks later she saw Harry Belafonte walking down the street she & her cousin Flavis Davis & sister Evelyn strolled to a show at the Fisher Theater walking down Woodward all of them wore kitten heels & box hats & white gloves & chiffon & organdy dresses & full makeup.” We catch our breath.

Queen was born and raised in Los Angeles, and most of the stories take place there. The rotating cast of celebrities—and their fashion—reflects a particular slice of Southern California in the nineties. When Queen meets Cuba Gooding, Jr., she is clad in a Kente Cloth bomber, an outfit that recalls television shows—such as “A Different World” and “In Living Color”—from earlier in the decade.

Just before the book’s postscript, Queen writes about her experience with a famous, unnamed poet. He e-mails her and remembers what she had on in a tone that reads as a forewarning for something worse. 31 She refuses to take him and his advances seriously. “I can’t help what I look like, but I can help what it looks like,” she writes, in regard to the way her pairing with this man may come across. The poem turns violent when—in a hotel-room encounter—the famous poet pushes Queen into a closet and squeezes her breasts. She screams, but he won’t stop. It is a visceral image. Even though the rest of the book had prepared me for this conclusion, I found myself becoming angry when it arrived—feeling Queen’s anger, and the anger that all of us should feel. Knowing that it was coming only made it worse, somehow. And then, there it was, the postscript: “Any Other Name,” in which Queen holds on to one of the things she has left—her name.

Khadijah Queen is the author of five poetry collections. She serves as core faculty in poetry and playwriting for the new Mile-High MFA in creative writing at Regis University, and is raising a teenager.

Violence, I know you By Khadijah Queen so well it’s like you’re my real lover, the reason I can’t stay attached to anyone, making a heaven out of beginning again & you knock at my voice as if I could speak you back in as mine & I had time enough to learn the secret of cruelty as if that made it lose its power over me, its antics failing notice, but it lives in us all like a question we can’t answer but keep trying because it feels good to & the secret is it can’t last, & that is when it hurts-- we who can’t bear to lose & stitch to any nothing that acts like a landing place but turns out to be a fissure, we pretend voices tell us it’s music & familiar or alien we listen, it’s only a dance

32 February 16 – Amanda Johnston

“let us widen our gaze to see clearly the people and lives blurred in the margins of rhetoric. Let us ask ourselves how we are using our power and privilege in language to empower our communities, lift the voices of others, and speak for those who have been silenced… I’ve asked myself: Who and what are my poems in service to? Let our poems be in service to the people. Let each word work relentlessly to call forth the best of our humanity.”

-Amanda Johnston on National Poetry Month 2016

The recipient of multiple Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Christina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival, Amanda Johnston is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. Johnston is a Stonecoast MFA faculty member, a cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founding executive director of Torch Literary Arts. She serves on the Cave Canem Foundation board of directors and currently lives in Texas.

Of Johnston’s work, Cave Canem co-founder Toi Derricotte has said, "Johnston’s poems apply just the right degree of salve and just the right degree of fire to our current American wounds. A beautifully crafted, fierce and compelling voice."

Amanda Johnston earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter. Her poetry and interviews have appeared in numerous publications, among them, Callaloo, Poetry, Kinfolks Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, Pluck!, No, Dear and the anthologies, Small Batch, Full, di-ver-city, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism.

When My Daughter Wasn't Assaulted by Amanda Johnston

She shook with fear, or was it guilt, but look at her white boyfriend pacing at the officer’s unraised hand and smile. along this strip of road and wonder, what if How she leaned away, slowly, when he called this was a different part of Texas? a tow truck instead of backup. What if this hero was a different shade of power? How her tears fled when he showed mercy Would she be so lucky, or was it luck, over rage for the couple on the side of the highway, if the absence of a known pain flat tire wasted against asphalt. She couldn’t help is just a heavy hand in repose?

33 February 17 – Morgan Parker

“Virgil Tibbs isn’t arrested, exactly, but the white cop in Sparta, Mississippi tells him to spread his legs, boy, and get into the back of the police car. It isn’t just a movie. Darren Wilson cannot find a job, twelve months after the shooting, which left his round cheeks pink with adrenaline. He lives a quiet life. His blue eyes sparkle. He is a man who shot a boy. No, a suspect. Boy. Rodney King became nationally known after he was beaten. Even angels want to live forever. Even angels want LA fame. On the phone I ask Jericho how the south is treating him. He says today he wasn’t shot to death, and we laugh. There’s no way a black woman killed herself, because everyone knows we can withstand inhuman amounts of pain. (There’s no way she didn’t hang herself, dumb brown martyr, not mentally sound to begin with.) Immortal. Magical. Not like angels, but like drinking water, like dusted roads. There’s no way we don’t deserve it. In 1992 in California my white classmates are like, aren’t you glad you’re free. Your people. What if you lived in the olden days. I’ve seen pictures of slavery, crude charcoals in watered-down history books, and that’s how I know I’m not a slave. What began to leak, then, from the laceration (the Sergeant’s name was Koon, and repetition is a literary device, and paranoia is a weakness of the oppressed—we cannot be mentally sound) was discipline, which for the slave is a tic of survival, and for a nation is the practice of denial. What did he have in his system? Was it hunger, or money? Was it glass, plants, voice? Death is the only cultural truth, because there are fake marriages every day, and even the rappers and their beef is cooked up in an office, in somebody’s pink cheeks. I know it’s just a movie, but I’m still afraid of what I see when I fall asleep. I know the masses ask me everyday for a eulogy. I know I am supposed to say shot and killed, say brutality, to call my life a life. This is their language and not mine. This is not my mouth. Multiple choice: In what year did a black man hang from a tree? Who is a nigger? Which of the following are negroes free to do: marry, own property, vote, drive, speak, bear arms, organize, revolt, be president, make movies, laugh. I worry sometimes I will only be allowed a death story. No one will say in the New Yorker how my mother made her money, who I married, how my career began. The death story might be a hashtag, a name folded into another name. My name might be a list, or a hymn, or a body, an investigation, a year, a lineage. I might become an autopsy, and the reason won’t matter, only my understanding, my swallowing of my rightful place, tectonic plates clicking like a jaw, and—stubbornly, like history—my mouth becoming their mouth speaking who I am.” -Morgan Parker, “A Brief History of the Present”

Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House Books 2017) and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books 2015). In 2019, a third collection of poems, Magical Negro, will be published by Tin House, and a young adult novel will be published by Delacorte Press. Her debut book of nonfiction will be released in 2020 by One World.

Parker received her Bachelor Degree in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her poetry and essays have been published and anthologized in numerous 34 publications, including The Paris Review, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip- Hop, Best American Poetry 2016, The New York Times, and The Nation. Parker is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel in New York. With Tommy Pico, she co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She is a Sagittarius, and she lives in Los Angeles.

The President Has Never Said the Word 'Black' By Morgan Parker

To the extent that one begins to wonder if he is broken.

It is not so difficult to open teeth and brass taxes.

The president is all like five on the bleep hand side.

The president be like we lost a young boy today.

The pursuit of happiness is guaranteed for all fellow Americans.

He is nobody special like us. He says brothers and sisters.

What kind of bodies are moveable and feasts. What color are visions.

When he opens his mouth a chameleon is inside, starving.

35 February 18 – Mahogany L. Browne

When asked about her favorite writing prompts, Mahogany L. Browne said, “Twitter. I have a new book of poems that are all 140 characters or less. It just began as a writing prompt. Easy enough. Every morning write a string of thoughts. And it helped. Immensely. If that doesn't help, Facebook Status. If that doesn't help, haiku. I learned the smaller the form, the easier to find the light. I also love a good 30/30. Pick a core group to write and critique with— it's refreshing and makes you check your ‘everything is gold’ crap at the door. It's a great lesson on the creation of art, editing your art, building a better and more open artistic community. And it's free. Ain't much better than that.”

Mahogany L. Browne was born in Oakland, California. She is the author of several poetry collections and chapbooks, including Smudge (Button Poetry, 2016), Redbone (Aquarius Press, 2015) and #Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out Online (Penmanship Books, 2010).

Browne is the founder and publisher of Penmanship Books, which she created “as the answer to the performance poet’s publishing problem.” She is also the author of Unlikely & Other Sorts (Penmanship Books, 2006), a collection of poetry and essays, and the editor of His Rib: Stories, Poems & Essays by HER (Penmanship Books, 2007).

Also an award-winning performance poet, Browne is active in the spoken word community. She has released five LPs of her work and serves as the poetry program director and Friday Night Slam curator for the Nuyorican Poets Café. She is currently pursuing an MFA in writing and activism at Pratt Institute in New York City.

Litany By Mahogany L. Browne

I wish I knew how It would feel to be free I wish I could break All the chains holding me —Nina Simone today i am a black woman in america & i am singing a melody ridden lullaby it sounds like: the gentrification of a brooklyn stoop the rent raised three times my wages the bodega and laundromat burned down on the corner the people on the corner 36 each lock & key their chromosomes a note of ash & inquiry on their tongues today i am a black woman in a hopeless state i will apply for financial aid and food stamps with the same mouth i spit poems from i will ask the angels of a creative god to lessen the blows & i will beg for forgiveness when i curse the rising sun today, i am a black woman in a body of coal i am always burning and no one knows my name i am a nameless fury, i am a blues scratched from the throat of ms. nina—i am always angry i am always a bumble hive of hello i love like this too loudly, my neighbors think i am an unforgiving bitter sometimes, i think my neighbors are right most times i think my neighbors are nosey today, i am a cold country, a storm brewing, a heat wave of a woman wearing red pumps to the funeral of my ex-lover’s today, i am a woman, a brown and black & brew woman dreaming of freedom today, i am a mother, & my country is burning and i forget how to flee from such a flamboyant backdraft —i’m too in awe of how beautiful i look on fire

37 February 19 – Jennifer Falu

“Did I tell you that I’m a from a different breed of magicians?” -Falu

Jennifer Falu recently won first place in NBC-TV’s Amiri Baraka Poetry Slam and was ranked third internationally in the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam. She has been a member of the 2006, 2009 and 2012 Nuyorican Poets Cafe Slam Teams, won the national Women of the World Poetry Slam in 2006, and ranked 3rd in the WOWPS in both 2009 and 2012. As a performer, Falu has shared the stage with Jennifer Holliday, Carl Thomas, and Patti LaBelle. She made her film debut in “Mania Days”, alongside Katie Holmes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=17&v=YiGsfY9fn7U

10 Things I Want To Say To A Black Man

1. There’s always been this awkward hue of brown that I love about you; The admirable transparency of your chest sometimes at night we lay; I watch the slaves hang themselves; even they are aware that only you can bare such a burden.

2. I watch you…on the sacred pew seats of the A train, legs ajar, feathered loose around your neck; My breath on your adam’s apple blowing in sin; I ain’t never been ashamed of what we do in the dark.

3. There is something about the skin of a black man that will make a woman squeeze herself into a box of his DNA; Something about your eyes that makes me want to collect your tears for Kool-Aid; You are magic; Always magic.

4. Sometimes in the middle of the week, I pretend to be your lover; The heavy of you on my chest, remove your suspenders; Heels on; I wore a dress for you. I said a prayer for you. I unpinned my hair for you. I crossed my legs for you. I am silent for you and you…, well you look beautiful all the time and I know that beautiful is a woman’s word but you are beautiful…

5. You catch me staring. My eyes bleeding through you pleading with the universe to ‘touch not my anointing and do my prophets no harm’…

38 6. Did I say that I too was magic? and that I’m just trying to make your valley of dry bones live…I’m just trying to hum you the (somme?)that has taken up residence in the scar of my C-section and climb the ladder of your spine…I’m trying to put the collage back into your knees…Brother, I would clean my house for you, run in the rain for you…I mean, do you know what happens to a black girl’s hair in the rain? but this is not about pride or greed or lust or envy but about sacrifice and sacrifice alone; Did I say that I was from a different breed of magicians?

7. Promise me that you would not promise things a man should not unless he is in fact a man; example: Do not promise me your heart, your last name, monogamy, poetry; Do not promise me the truth and then lie cause I will set your valley of dry bones on fire; Did I say that I was from a different breed of magicians?

8. Women are silly and emotional. If in fact you find a woman that is serious and emotionless, she is insane.

9. Do you remember how small you felt the first time you stood beside the ocean? How the mist from the waves wrapped around your neck like the hands of a former lover; The breaking tide against your forehead; The massage it gave your brows; Well, I’ve got those hands. Long fingers that would stagger around your eyes. I tell you the smell is a mixture of want and need and salt and tears like ocean and lake; a sea of (wet?), I swear to God, I hope that I remind you of water, of purity, of baptism.

10. You can swim…can’t you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiGsfY9fn7U

39 February 20 – Jaha Zainabu

Today I will listen to the whole song. Watch the dance until the end. Will laugh until the funny fills my belly all up. I will take pictures of the trees. Way the leaves want to bend and scoop me up. I will pray and give thanks for all the things. Things that hurt, that helped, that healed. Things that made me sing, with my not singing self. Today I will walk without my shoes. Let the dirt between my toes. I will sit and stare at the sky. See what the clouds have to say. I will write poems and tell stories. Will dance and scream. Shout joy all through this place. -Jaha Zainabu

As someone wrote, Jaha Zainabu is a lot of things: performance poet, photographer, artist… The list could go on and on. But more than anything, she is an incredibly sincere human being whose words and presence will uplift even the most downtrodden of us. Currently based in Los Angeles, Jaha’s work is often inspiring and comforting. I appreciate that her words are an invitation—when she performs, you feel as if you are in conversation with a spectacular woman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg3hX9RXdCU

Rhythm By Jaha Zainabu

Tie me into your locks So I can hear the music in your head Before the others do Dance me lightly into your tangle foot groove We step left foot first then right Your blood pumps in sync with mine in 3/4 all the time Me and you Are different

Sing me softly with heavy vibrato into your lullabies I will know right then that you love me Weave me into your butt naked dreams Where you are begging me please

40 To take your hand and follow you into forever

Take me I wanna go

Make me unafraid to love you back Loose my inhibitions and I will love you lovely Giving understanding new To the stress of our very everyday

When we unite Our worlds will be transformed Carmex me beautiful on lips Full of promises kept I will speak in cadence often Of my love never ever ending for you boldly

Vaseline me greasy on knees ashy From rising always after being knocked unjust I honor the essence of you Smell you every time I close my eyes You lie beautifully underneath me

Walk like a king righteous I will give Humble, soon, comfortable Knowing my back is got

Sit shiva facing me I massage real life into your scalp Beeswax sticky icky on my palms Tell me you love me And I will believe

41 February 21 – Dominique Christina

This song is not a language, Not a thing to be remembered, The field-holler tradition of Teeth and knees Cursing wind, A concert hall of bloody hands Spilling the earth, Strangling dirt, Sledgehammer curses Of men busted open. -Dominique Christina, from “Chain Gang”

Dominique Christina is an educator, poet, and author of three books including This Is Woman’s Work (Sounds True, 2015).

42 Strange Fruit For Emmett Till "Southern trees bear a strange fruit. Blood on the leaves and blood at the root." In this photo he's laughing and there's no cotton gin tied 'round his waist. He's not stretched into swollen limbs. His eyes are still hazel and recognizable, two neat white rows of perfect teeth sit totem-like in his mouth and the world didn't know him because he'd not been murdered yet. He's still slipping into the kitchen to get another piece of cornbread while his mama ain't lookin'. He'll mash it with his fingers, drink some buttermilk and laugh with his eyes and they're still hazel and bright like stars in uppercase and ain't nobody gouged 'em out or shut 'em closed and when he goes to school he'll do a silly dance with his arms and legs cocked out in odd angles and his classmates will laugh and there'll be no cotton gin tied 'round his waist. "Pastoral scenes of the gallant south, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouths..." In this photo he's proud of the hat on his head. You can see that by how straight his neck is and his mama's in the picture and they got the same face and his head's high and perfect and ain't no bullet in it and it'll be months before there is one and in those months he's his mother's child, the smug and overfed man-child all southern

43 women love to cook for and dote on cuz he licks the plate clean even if it's leftovers. He just eats and yes ma'ams and makes you giggle so much you got to shoo him out the kitchen just so you can get the pots clean and he's breathing and whole and ain't no men dressed like midnight with yellow teeth and sunless un-laughing eyes snatching him out the door changing everything when neither of 'em asked to be anything other than laughing in the kitchen with the greens still simmering in the pot. "Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck..." This last photo's a holocaust. The one history concretized into the nighttime musings of black children who hopscotched above and below the bible belt, who saw a tattered other worldly version of the 14 year-old Emmett, his head poised strangely above a sharp black suit on the cover of Jet magazine. There were no eyes, smiling mischievous man-child wonderful, cornbread and buttermilk slicking, fast talking, looking like his mama, bubblegum pop saunter and sizzle straight necked full of tomorrow's boy staring back into the camera. What was there, wasn't there at all. What was there, swallowed the world. My mama was eight years old when they painted Emmett Till's fractured image on the cover of a negro magazine.

44 Eight years old. Pigtails, knee socks, pinafores, pleats, and a heap of pretty girl possibilities. But I know my grandmother set that book down with intention on the coffee table knowing her baby girl would see it and know what shouldn't be known but what must be known. This is what the south did when an adolescent mistake when a fast-talking, finger-snapping negro from up north whistles and boasts about big city white girl honeys with rosy lips and no Jim Crow. It's an imagine I shoved at my 13 year old son, frenetic in my attempt to tell him that this is black history. I need him to known that if he isn't careful, not brave, not the sum total of all our unlit courage, if he relegates these stories to cliff-notes, he'll bleed out and die in the epilogue. I need you to know, Salih, that my arms will never be wide enough to cover sins like these, that your head held so high is still a cautionary tale but to go on and do it anyway and laugh and dance with your arms and legs cocked out in odd angles and slip by me and get the extra cornbread whenever you can and be grateful that when you and your boys say something slick about the pretty blonde girl in the front row of algebra...

45 You're permitted that levity after 400 years of midnights. Necks decorated in nooses. Plantations that decorated terrorism in white pillars and mint juleps. I tell my son to remember Emmett Till, to remember when his eyes were still hazel, still smiling and how high he held his head to celebrate that brand new hat, to remember that his mother loved him and almost couldn't recognize him after that last whistle left his throat. I tell him I'll be his mother and celebrate his brown boy buoyancy all the days of my life, and that while I don't know what tomorrow holds, I know that he'll never be strange fruit, will never be broken open, will never be strung up, will never be hog tied, will never have his face so like my own crushed or mangled or hatcheted. I tell my son: I'm growing these limbs to get 'round him and surround him and we'll be strong and unapologetically black for as long as we can be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=k-F5UX7tYMs

46 February 22 – Angel Nafis

Ghazal for Becoming Your Own Country By Angel Nafis

After Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s “Self Stones Country” photographs

Know what the almost-gone dandelion knows. Piece by piece The body prayers home. Its whole head a veil, a wind-blown bride.

When all the mothers gone, frame the portraits. Wood spoon over Boiling pot, test the milk on your own wrist. You soil, sand, and mud grown bride.

If you miss your stop. Or lose love. If even the medicine hurts too. Even when your side-eye, your face stank, still, your heart moans bride.

Fuck the fog back off the mirror. Trust the road in your name. Ride Your moon hide through the pitch black. Gotsta be your own bride.

Burn the honey. Write the letters. What address could hold you? Nectar arms, nectar hands. Old tire sound against the gravel. Baritone bride.

Goodest grief is an orchard you know. But you have not been killed Once. Angel, put that on everything. Self. Country. Stone. Bride.

Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and is an MFA candidate in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Rattling Wall, The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, MUZZLE Magazine, The Rumpus, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere.

Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency, an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. In 2011 she represented the LouderArts poetry project at both the Women of the World Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam. With poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn with artist, writer, and musician Shira Erlichman. In 2016, Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

47 Gravity By Angel Nafis

After Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Kitchen Table Series”

I. THE STRAW

Can you throw this away Maybe you should hire more Black staff Where are you really from You’re not busy are you You look ethnic today Where’s the African American section Can you turn the music down Fasterfasterfaster Let me see those eyes Beautiful If you were mine I’d never let you leave the house It’s like you went straight to Africa to get this one Is that your hair I mean your real hair Blackass Your gums are black You Black You stink You need a perm I don’t mean to be racist

But You’re scarred over, I’m the one bleeding You’re just going to rip apart whatever I say You’ve said sorry only two times We tacitly agreed Then dead me

II. THE CAMEL'S BACK

When you born on somebody else’s river in a cursed boat it’s all downhill from there. Ha. Just kidding. I’d tell you what I don’t have time for but I don’t have time. Catch up. Interrogate that. Boss. Halo. I juke the apocalypse. Fluff my feathers. Diamond my neck. Boom, like an 808. One in a million. I don’t want no scrubs. You don’t know my name. Everything I say is a spell. I’m twenty-five. I’m ninety. I’m ten. I’m a moonless charcoal. A sour lover. Hidden teeth beneath the velvet. I’m here and your eyes lucky. I’m here and your future lucky. Ha. God told me to tell you I’m pretty. Ha. My skin Midas-touch the buildings I walk by. Ha. Every day I’m alive the weather report say: Gold. I know. I know. I should leave y’all alone, salt earth like to stay

48 salty. But here go the mirror, egging on my spirit. Why I can’t go back. Or. The reasons it happened. Name like a carriage of fire. Baby, it’s real. The white face peeking through the curtain. Mule and God. I’m blunted off my own stank. I’m Bad. I dig graves when I laugh.

49 February 23 – Tonya Ingram

“My advice to others is to write through these difficult moments--these moments of questioning, these moments of agony, these moments of silence between you and your body--and to listen and to be okay with not being okay.” -Tonya Ingram

Tonya Ingram is the 2011 New York Knicks Poetry Slam champion, a member and co-founder of NYU's poetry slam team, a member of the 2011 Urban Word-NYC team, the 2013 Nuyorican Grand Slam team and the 2015 Da Poetry Lounge Slam team. She is a six-time poetry slam finalist, a 2014 Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of Growl and Snare. Her work has traveled throughout the United States, Ghana, The Literary Bohemian, Huffington Post, Amy Poehler's Smart Girls, LupusChick.com, For Harriet, Buzzfeed, Afropunk, Rude Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Marie Claire Italia, The WILD, Upworthy, To Write Love On Her Arms, Youtube and season four of Lexus Verses and Flow.

Her focus is the intersectionality of art as healing and art as awareness about mental and physical health. She has shared the stage with Hill Harper, Soledad O' Brien, President Clinton, Anthony Hamilton, Lynn Whitfield, and others. She is a New York University alumna, a Cincinnati native, a Bronx- bred introvert and is a recent graduate from Otis College of Art & Design where she obtained her MFA in Public Practice. Her first full length book of poetry, Another Black Girl Miracle is with NOT A CULT.

Unsolicited Advice to Skinny Girls with Bitten Nails and Awkward Glares, Part 1

After Jeanann Verlee When your best friend’s father invites you over, say no. When the girls at school tease you for wearing payless light-ups, do not wrench your face. Smile, then tie your laces. When you finally learn how to Dougie and its 2011, show off to everyone you know When you finally learn how to do the original Harlem shake and its 2011, keep it to yourself When your mother asks you to buy her a pregnancy test, do not slam the door behind you. Do not snatch the twenty from your birthright. When she says she is pregnant, do not sacred suck your teeth. Do not holy roll your eyes. When the boy with the intrusive shadow calls you a “ white girl” do not cower your head. Do not question your black.

50 When she says she is pregnant, do not sacred suck your teeth. Do not holy roll your eyes. When the boy with the intrusive shadow calls you a “ white girl” do not cower your head. Do not question your black. When your grandmother says you act like an old lady, take it as a compliment. Set the teapot. Knit the turtleneck. Check on the apple pie. When the next NYU student asks to touch your hair. Laugh, then ask if you can touch theirs. When your best friend’s father invites you over, say no. When you catch your brother with a porno, act surprised. Laugh it off. Do not call him a sinner. When your mother asks why you take so long in the shower, tell her you hate this cancer. This dark that wears you like a plague . When you discover your grandmother is bipolar and schizophrenic , hug her. Then Google each illness. When you question if you are anything like her, hug yourself. Then Google each illness. When you cry in front of your brother because he has just learned you are not his full sister, do not slump your shoulders. Your eyes are a well the thirsty crave. Pour into him. When your best friend’s father invites you over, say no.

Unsolicited Advice to Skinny Girls with Bitten Nails and Awkward Glares, Part 2

After Jeanann Verlee When you visit your brother at Riker’s Island, do not blink to hold back the tears. You are Moses. He is the miracle. This is the red sea. When your mother brings your sister home from the hospital, do not hide your hands. Do not fear you will drop her. She is a medallion in a collection plate of screws. Treasure her. When the older woman with silver hair and loose teeth calls you a nigger, give her the finger. give her Jay-Z’s “The Blueprint”. Give her The word of God. When the your mother’s ex-boyfriend puts his hands on your brothers, grab the chair When your mother’s ex-boyfriend puts his hands on your sister, grab the frying pan When your mother’s ex-boyfriend puts his hands on your mother, grab the phone. Grab a knife. Grab your voice. This is Armageddon. This is taking back what the devil has stolen. Do not fear. Do not cower. Do not question. When your best friend’s father invites you over, say no. You are resurrection. You are silence turned shotgun. And death has no place here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbS9yNSQyAA

53 February 24 – Aziza Barnes

“To quote Octavia Butler, ‘I'm uncomfortably asocial—a hermit in the middle of Seattle, a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive…’ What's important to me is trying to understand humanity and doing something of consequence that doesn't hurt people—that liberates people. I'm about doing that safely and with integrity and consent and security and fucking bias and prejudice and healing and forgiveness.” -Aziza Barnes

Twenty four-year-old afro-surrealist poet Aziza Barnes’ words are "quite black and quite gay," bursting with a voice that is sassy yet curious with conviction. The author of two books of poetry won the Pamet River Prize in 2015 and hosts the Poetry Gods podcast with Jon Sands and José Olivarez, where she conducts lighthearted interviews with contemporary poets. She's also made her mark on the slam circuit, performing everywhere from Da Poetry Lounge in Los Angeles to Urban Word NYC. When the Los Angeles-born NYU alum recites powerful lines like, "You are an unstitched doll learning her parts as she loses them," from her poem "Hypnophobia," she lets the words simmer in the listener's mind.

As a queer woman who was born with a polycystic ovary that has enabled her to grow facial hair since the age of 12, her presence and distinct aura defy the tired norms of race and gender in this country. These qualities which help make the up-and-coming artist's perspective so vital and powerful, also make her vulnerable on the streets of New York. Last month, walking down Queens Blvd to her aunt's house, sporting a bright purple wig and a dark brown goatee, she ran into an older white man who caused her to do something that was pretty out of character—be silent. As the man looked Barnes up and down, he ignorantly asked "What in the fuck are you supposed to be?"

Later, she recounted the run-in on Facebook, posing the same question to herself. Amongst a flood of posts from pissed off friends and concerned family members threatening to "dispatch a fleet of hungry eagles with a taste for man-flesh" on the stranger, Barnes's unsolicited query was also met with stories from transgender, non-binary, gay, black, Latino, and Asian folks who empathized with the hostile encounter. "'What in the fuck are you supposed to be?' Realized I actually don't know," Barnes wrote. But how could that be? How could an award-winning poet who's performed everywhere from PBS News Hour to Nuyoricans Poets Cafe with work that specifically explores black, queer, and feminine identities not know who she is?

“When the white dude yelled at me in Queens, I just let it happen and I let it hurt me because I really thought I looked so beautiful. My aunt wanted me to let it go. I said, ‘Yeah, but he's the world.’ He's the world's representative for how people react when they see someone like me. But I'm not willing to go back to straight presenting or straight passing, which for me is what any alteration of expression would be.”

She says, “There's a desperate need to be understood—[and also to understand] that things are subjective. There's no objective truth—there's no gender, there's no race. There's none of those things 54 because if you are able to get over the fucking constraints of the cage that we're in, in a way that is creative, fluid, and honest, you can have a pretty fucking great life. I think that's how my poetry plays into this world. We're starting to question things that we were taught even at the most seemingly simplistic levels.”

“Alleyway” by Aziza Barnes

As fresh garbage is. As dirt sucked out of a fingernail. As a wall clean of prostitutes. When I am this I am at the mercy of my nakedness. A pillar of undress whose power I do not know how to wield. I watch porn. I study the geometry of limbs splayed. Not the moan but the angle of a moan. I swallow. In this way I am a thief. Sometimes I forget my body & go untouched until I am touched & scream. Sometimes I want to eat my breasts down to their bitter rind & spit them out. I want to be the bitter rind without suck and easily thrown. Easily thrown I want to be the pebble thumbed & wished upon before enveloping the lake I sink in. I sink in you the lake & by lake I mean gutter a water that does not hold me well. Here we are not the bodies our mothers made. If you are to hold me hold me as a gun. Grip me & profit the dark. The unattended purse. The pair of heels darting from us in dull claps sharpening against the concrete as teeth against a stone.

55 February 25 – Bettina Judd

“It begins at this moment of invoking history, at this point where I’m extremely vulnerable, where the patient, who is also the researcher, is extremely vulnerable,” she said. “And what it means that we can be living the past, living history in the present moment, even in a moment of crisis.” -Bettina Judd, “Patient”

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and performer whose research focus is on Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. Her current book manuscript argues that Black women’s creative production is feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect she calls “feelin.”

She has received fellowships from the Five Colleges, The Vermont Studio Center and the University of Maryland. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in poetry.

Her poems have appeared in Torch, Mythium, Meridians and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems titled Patient, is a collection of poems that tackle the history of medical experimentation on and display of Black women. Patient won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize and was released in November of 2014. As a performer she has been invited to perform for audiences in Vancouver, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Paris, New York, and Mumbai.

Bettina Judd knows how to be patient. The visiting assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at William & Mary said she was patient when she waited for medical care and was patient, to a point, with the hospital staff withholding it. Then she was literally a patient. Later she wrote patiently, waiting to sort out the ghosts that haunted her experience as a young, black woman undergoing “an ordeal with medicine.”

So it was only fitting that she played on every sense of the word when she titled her first book of poems, “Patient.”

The project began as Judd healed from surgery that removed her ovary after a torsion. As Judd tried to process through poetry the experience and the negative aspects of treatment she received, the voices of the forgotten women she learned about through scholarship insistently broke through, she said. No matter how hard she tried, she could not decouple the past from her present experience.

“It begins at this moment of invoking history, at this point where I’m extremely vulnerable, where the patient, who is also the researcher, is extremely vulnerable,” she said. “And what it means that we can be living the past, living history in the present moment, even in a moment of crisis.”

So Judd worked the voices into the poetry, letting the “ghost” women speak and in doing so, elucidating a historical link between women’s medicine, showmanship and racist treatment of black, female patients.

54 In “Patient.” the reader encounters the dubious legacy of J. Marion Sims, credited as “the father of gynecology” for fashioning the first speculum, from a pewter spoon, in the 1840s.

Usually not credited are the three enslaved women – Anarcha Westcott, Lucy Zimmerman and Betsey Harris – on whom Sims experimented for years in a makeshift operating room in his backyard. He performed dozens of surgeries on them without anesthesia while medical students observed.

The Inauguration of Experiments, December 1845 -by Bettina Judd

Lucy didn’t scream like most. Though sometimes she would moan--deep, long and overdue. I’d wake thinking death. It’s her, knees curled under, head face down, her body trying to move out of itself. Anarcha and I take turns wiping her head with cool rags, warming her feet with our hands, singing to her. She would join in a voice so low it wasn't like she was singing at all but whispering a prayer that hushed on long after we finished.

Doctor spent a lot of time with Lucy. He would stand at the foot of her bed looking. Not mad just like he had a whole lot of questions and wanted answers from her. I had questions too, so I looked to Anarcha.

She thought a long time. Finally said, She too sick to die. We too well to be living.

55 February 26 – Nayyirah Waheed

“And I said to my body, softly, ‘I want to be your friend.’ It took a long breath and replied, ‘I have been waiting my whole life for this.’” -Nayyirah Waheed

“My heart is in my mind. I think this is why I’m an artist,” Nayyirah Waheed has written. "Poems come as they will. They come as they want, when I'm waking, eating, exercising, chatting with someone. Sometimes they come to me as a whole, sometimes a line. I think it's one of the ways my soul communicates with me, I do my best to sit down and listen."

Nayyirah Waheed is a U.S. based writer. She began writing at the tender age of 11 after a teacher asked the class to write a poem to put into a community newspaper. From that assignment, Nayyirah discovered a new medium for self-expression. From the age of 11 till now, Nayyirah Waheed has blossomed into a powerful poet/artist and woman.

Here are a few of her poems: even if you are a small forest surviving off of you broke the ocean moon alone. in half to be here your light is extraordinary. only to meet nothing that wants you. -reminder -immigrant

And one of my favorite poems: some people when they hear your story contract, others upon hearing your story, expand, and this is how you know. For more of these poems, go here.

56 February 27 – Yrsa Daley Ward

“If you’re afraid to write it, that’s a good sign. I suppose you know you’re writing the truth when you’re terrified.” -”Yrsa Daley-Ward

Daley-Ward spent her late teens and early 20s as a model struggling to pay her rent in London, working for brands such as Apple, Topshop, Estée Lauder and Nike. She still models today. Ironically, however, it was the image- obsessed medium of Instagram that enabled her to pursue the written word.

“I always was a writer,” she explains today in a thick Lancashire accent, sitting in a downtown Los Angeles restaurant close to where she lives. “But I was depressed [in London] and that made me choke. Modelling is an interesting profession because it teaches you so much about here…” She points a finger at her face. “But not here…” she sighs and points at her heart. “You become introverted, you disappear into yourself.”

Daley-Ward’s debut collection of poetry, Bone, is anything but introverted. Aptly titled, it’s a visceral read candidly documenting her religious upbringing, sexuality and mental-health battles. It flew out of her in three months, as she chronicled her bad love affairs, sense of isolation and feelings of inadequacy – an uncomfortable, uninhibited read. Daley-Ward is a self-confessed firestarter and has a colourful past. She doesn’t watch TV and prefers to go to the pub to drink Guinness and “chat to old men about their lives”. When asked to give her age, she refuses. “Men don’t get asked,” she barks.

She finds the notion of being objectified irksome. In a bodycon dress today, she tells me she’s been cat- called “seven times” en route here. “Why the fuck? Look at the patriarchy, look at rape culture. I don’t need to be subjected to what men think.” With her poems she cuts through that, deep into the parts of herself that she feels have been overseen by superficial, homogenous norms.

Daley-Ward, who is of West Indian and West African descent, is part of a small, elite community of black writers who are breaking down barriers. “It’s lovely to see women of colour poets,” she says. “Old poetry can be so inaccessible. Not just for people of colour but for people who aren’t super erudite, who don’t read, don’t love Shakespeare. Some people just want to connect with feelings.”

Scent By Yrsa Daley-Ward

In theory I have written you out of my memory. Still, the middle of my face refuses to be told.

57

I’m undone. Perhaps it is the air in my head. Three years. And I did too much work on our love. Three years and I can't undo the problem of your scent.

It is a horrid and complicated fact. My fifth sense an ambush. I walk by the bakery, chip shop, flower stall, shopping centre, leather goods store all the Mornings in Lancashire still smell like you. Last week I was caught in a storm overseas. When the rain smell drove me silly all I could see were your eyes.

Now home, I light the stove. I cook new food these days from recipe books. Now that you’re gone I can fry meat. I buy a perfume I know you hate and spread it on your side of the bed. still you greet me in waves I can not decipher. Last night I smelled you in a dream. It is a thumbprint now but I can't forget the loss.

I dreamed you beautiful. You are nothing beautiful. But three years and I can’t clean you off my skin.

58 February 28 – Warsan Shire

“Character driven poetry is important for me—it’s being able to tell the stories of those people, especially refugees and immigrants, that otherwise wouldn’t be told, or they’ll be told really inaccurately. And I don’t want to write victims, or martyrs, or vacuous stereotypes … my family are really amazing—they’ll tell me, ‘I have a new story for you,’ and I’ll get my Dictaphone and record it, so I can stay as true as possible to the story before I make it into a poem.” -Warsan Shire

Poet and activist Warsan Shire grew up in London. According to Alexis Okeowo in the New Yorker, Shire’s work “embodies the kind of shape-shifting, culture-juggling spirit lurking in most people who can’t trace their ancestors to their country’s founding fathers, or whose ancestors look nothing like those fathers. In that limbo, Shire conjures up a new language for belonging and displacement.” Shire’s poems connect gender, war, sex, and cultural assumptions; in her work, poetry is a healing agent for the trauma of exile and suffering.

Shire is poetry editor of Spook Magazine and guest edited Young Sable LitMag. Shire has read her work in South Africa, Italy, Germany, and the United States. In 2013, she won Brunel University’s first African Poetry Prize. In 2014, she was named the first Young Poet Laureate for London and chosen as poet-in- residence for Queensland, Australia.

She has written one of my favorite poems:

Home by Warsan Shire no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay.

59 no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet hot blood in your belly it’s not something you ever thought of doing until the blade burnt threats into your neck and even then you carried the anthem under your breath only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back. you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled means something more than journey. no one crawls under fences no one wants to be beaten pitied no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire and one prison guard in the night

60 is better than a truckload of men who look like your father no one could take it no one could stomach it no one skin would be tough enough the go home blacks refugees dirty immigrants asylum seekers sucking our country dry niggers with their hands out they smell strange savage messed up their country and now they want to mess ours up how do the words the dirty looks roll off your backs maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone than your child body in pieces. i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark

61 home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through the oceans drown save be hunger beg forget pride your survival is more important no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i dont know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI9D92Xiygo

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