Showing results by author "Aracelis Girmay" in All Categories

Renia White is a first-time author. Her debut collection, Casual Conversation, was chosen by Aracelis Girmay as a Blessing the Boats Selection. Named in honor of Lucille Clifton’s National Book Award-winning collection, Blessing the Boats Selections spotlight new poetry collections by women poets of color. Previous Blessing the Boats Selections include Letters to a Young Brown Girl by Barbara Jane Reyes and Year of the Dog by Deborah Paredez.

Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition.