KPI 2020 Poetry Prize Winners
Erica Hunt selects Gash Atlas by Jessica Lawson as the winner of KPI’s 2020 Poetry Prize! First and second place …
Postcards to the Future: LEGACY Harryette Mullen
In this poem by Harryette Mullen, the idea of Legacy is presented through the historic violence of dispassionate bureaucratic language, the policies of oppression, and slippages of their true significance. Through this form of text, Mullen outlines historical oppression of vulnerable people, with emphasis on the African diaspora. We Are Not Responsible by Harryette …
Postcards to the Future: LEGACY Yona Harvey
In this poem by Yona Harvey, the idea of Legacy is underscored not only through oppression but the enduring spirit of Black womanhood in power connecting to her primordial spirit. The River Wanderer by Yona Harvey There was a river turned to Goddess. Was kin to river turned to Flame. As …
Postcards to the Future: LEGACY Erica Hunt inheritance
Excerpts from Erica Hunt’s introduction to Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing. Angle, Defy Gravity, Land Unpredictably By Erica Hunt The future is a slippery project. What can it hold? We asked writers to write about it, imagining the future as the present conjugated—conjoining the past, the present with some other time. Don’t writers …
Niki Herd / George Floyd And The White Gaze
Now That Another Black Body Has Been Laid to Rest: George Floyd And The White Gaze by Niki Herd I don’t know who George Floyd is yet, but I am already angry. It is Wednesday, May 20th, eleven weeks into America’s full consciousness of a worldwide pandemic that even with its rising slope of fatalities …
Joy Harjo / One day I did not know what to do with my anger
Joy Harjo June 1, 2020 This last week has been one of failures, facing my own poor communication skills (why do you think I was given this path of words?!), rifts and coming together in family, a mulberry tree, and tending to the wounded sacredness of our family, community, this earth. One day I wondered …