Two Poems Reprinted in Teaching Black Anthology
I am honored to have two of my poems reprinted in the upcoming University of Pittsburgh Press anthology Teaching Black: Pedagogy, Practice, and Perspectives on Writing edited by Ana Lara and Drea Brown.
Both of these poems— “an open letter to the school resource officer who almost shot me in my class” & “the surprising thing” — appear in my first collection, Teaching While Black.
This Present Former Glory: An Anthology of Honest Spiritual Literature [Editor]
When you’re asked to edit an anthology of creative writing by atheists, clergy, and people everywhere in between you can’t say no. At least I can’t. I am thrilled and humbled by how this all came together.
45 stupid talented writers tackled the deepest and most abiding questions about wrestling with their conceptions of divinity and spirituality in the midst of systematic racism, church camps, sexism, babies, a pandemic, slavery, callings into ministry, abusive parents, divorces, holding hands with the dying, sweeping glass after a riot, and sitting by the ocean, waiting.
This Present Former Glory: An Anthology of Honest Spiritual Literature can be purchased at A Game for Good Christians’ website for $16.95. And it’s well worth the price.
Two Poems in Show Us Your Papers (Anthology)-- Currently in Pre-Sale
Two of my poems will appear in the upcoming anthology Show Us Your Papers:
“legacy” ~ on emails containing last wills and testaments
and
“we all have to make sacrifices” ~ on racial microaggressions against the people least likely to shoot up a public school.
From the Introduction of the anthology:
Show Us Your Papers speaks to a crisis of identity and belonging, to an increasing sense of vulnerability amid rapid changes in the USA. While corporations wait to assign us a number, here are 81 poets who demand full identities, richer than those allowed by documents of every sort. Here are poems of immigration and concentration camps, of refugees and wills, marriage and divorce, of lost correspondence and found parents, of identity theft and medical charts. In an era where the databases multiply, where politicians and tech companies sort us into endless categories, identifying documents serve as thumbtacks. They freeze the dancing, lurching, rising and falling experience of our lives. The disconnect between our documents and our identities is inherent, reductive, frustrating, and, too often, dangerous. Yet we cannot live without them. In this anthology 81 poets offer a richer sense of our lives and histories—richer than any “official paper” allows. These lyric and narrative forms demand that readers recognize our full identities: personal, familial, national, and historical…