Two poetry anthologies, which have emerged from the Black Lives Matter movements in both the USA and Britain, will get an Irish launch at the next Over The Edge reading.
The Over The Edge Writers’ Gathering via Zoom takes place on Friday June 25 at 8pm, and will feature readings from both anthologies, and a discussion of the events which has made Black Lives Matter a necessary movement.
The books
Black Lives Matter: Poems for a New World, edited by Ambrose Musiyiwa and published by Civic Leicester, features 107 poems from writers around the world on the theme, “Black Lives Matter.” The poems reflect how people are rallying against the killing of Black people by police and against racism, racialised inequality, discrimination, violence and oppression. The anthology encourages the reader to imagine and work towards a world where Black Lives Matter.
Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, 2020 ) is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry, co-edited by Sequoia Maner, Emily Ruth Rutter, and Darlene Anita Scott, that investigates contemporary elegy within the Black diaspora. Scores of contemporary Black writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in to militate against the white-supremacist logic that has led to the recent deaths of unarmed Black men, women, and children.
This volume combines scholarly and creative understandings of the elegy in order to elucidate how mourning can feed political awareness, as Black writers attempt to see, hear, and say something to the bodies of the dead, as well as to living readers.
The poets
Poets and writers taking part in the Over The Edge launch will be Angela Jackson-Brown, Lauren K Alleyne, Sequoia Maner, Emily Ruth Rutter, Darlene Anita Scott, Richard Byrt, Paul Francis, and Ambrose Musiyiwa.
Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet, and playwright who teaches creative writing and English at Ball State University, Indiana. She is the author of the novel, Drinking From A Bitter Cup, while her play, Anna’s Wings, was selected in 2016 to be a part of the IndyFringeDivaFest. Her new novel, When Stars Rain Down, was recently awarded the Alabama Authors Award in poetry by the Alabama Library Association.
Lauren K Alleyne hails from Trinidad and Tobago. Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction have been widely published in journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic, Ms Muse, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Interviewing the Caribbean. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (2014 ) and Honeyfish (2019 ).
Sequoia Maner is a poet and Assistant Professor of African American literature at Spelman College, Atlanta. Her writing has been published in The Feminist Wire, Meridians, Obsidian, and The Langston Hughes Review. She is currently working on a book about Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series.
Emily Ruth Rutter is an Associate Professor of English at Ball State University, and the author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line (2018 ), The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry (2018 ), and the forthcoming Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists.
Darlene Anita Scott’s recent writing appears in Simple Machines, Green Mountains Review, and Pen + Brush. Her debut poetry collection, Marrow, will be published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2022.
The work of the poet Richard Byrt explores reasons, individually and in society, for offensive, discriminatory beliefs and actions. Paul Francis is a retired teacher living in Shropshire, who is a poet, writer, and performer.
Ambrose Musiyiwa is the editor of Black Lives Matter: Poems for a New World. He has also edited B*****ks to Brexit: an Anthology of Poems and Short Fiction (2019 ) and Leicester 2084 AD: New Poems about The City (2018 ). He is the author of The Gospel According to Bobba, and his poems have been anthologised.
To join the Over The Edge Writers’ Gathering go to https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7389013549. The meeting ID is 738 901 3549.
