The June Over
The Edge Writers’ Gathering takes place on Zoom on Friday, June 25th at 8.00pm (local Galway Irish time). The
event celebrates two prominent international poetry anthologies which have
emerged from the Black Lives Matter movement in both the United States of
America and Britain. There will be readings of poems from both anthologies and
a discussion of the events which brought these important additions to the
poetry canon into being.
Black Lives
Matter: Poems for a New World is edited by Ambrose Musiyiwa and was published by
Civic Leicester U.K in 2021. It presents 107 poems from writers around the
world on the theme, "Black Lives Matter." The poems reflect how,
around the world, people are rallying against the killing of Black people by
the 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. CivicLeicester is an indy publisher
that uses events, video, photography, social media, print and digital media to
highlight conversations. Published books include Black Lives Matter: Poems
for a New World and Per terra e per mare: Poesie per chi è in cerca di
rifugio (translated by Pietro Deandrea).
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, & Darlene Anita Scott, that investigates
contemporary elegy within the Black diaspora. Scores of contemporary Black
writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order 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 feeds our
political awareness in this dystopian time, as Black writers attempt to see,
hear, and say something to the bodies of the dead as well as to living readers.
Moreover, this book provides a model for how to productively interweave theoretical
and deeply personal accounts to encourage discussions about art and activism
that transgress disciplinary boundaries, as well as lines of race, gender,
class, and nation.
Participating poets and
writers include: Angela
Jackson-Brown, Lauren K. Alleyne, Sequoia Maner, Emily Ruth Rutter, Darlene Anita Scott, Richard Byrt, Tanisha
Barrett, Paul
Francis, & Ambrose Musiyiwa
Angela
Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet and playwright who
teaches Creative Writing and English at Ball State University in Muncie, IN.
She is a graduate of Troy University, Auburn University and the Spalding
low-residency MFA program in Creative Writing. She is the author of the novel Drinking From A Bitter Cup and
has published in numerous literary journals. Angela’s play, Anna’s Wings, was selected in 2016 to be
a part of the IndyFringeDivaFest and her play, Flossie Bailey Takes a Stand,
was part of the Indiana Bicentennial Celebration at the Indiana Repertory
Theatre. She also wrote and produced the play It Is Well and she was the co-playwright with Ashya Thomas on a
play called Black Lives Matter (Too).
In the spring of 2018, Angela co-wrote a musical with her colleague, Peter Davis,
called Dear Bobby: The Musical, that
was part of the 2018 OnyxFest in Indianapolis, IN. Her book of poetry called House Repairs was
published by Negative Capability Press in
the fall of 2018, and in the fall of 2019, she directed and produced a play she
wrote called Still Singing Those Weary
Blues. Her new novel, When Stars
Rain Down, to be published by Thomas Nelson, an imprint of HarperCollins,
was recently published and Angela was recently awarded, by the Alabama Library
Association, the Alabama Authors Award in poetry.
Lauren K. Alleyne hails
from the twin island nation of 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, Interviewing the Caribbean, Crab
Orchard Review, among many others. She is author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal
Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish (New
Issues (US) & Peepal Tree (UK), 2019).
Sequoia Maner is a
poet and Assistant Professor of African American
literature at Spelman College. Her writing has been published
in The Feminist Wire, Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review, and other
venues. She is a co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in
the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge 2020). She is at work
on a manuscript regarding Kendrick Lamar's album To Pimp a
Butterfly for the 33 1/3 series (Bloomsbury) and her prize-winning
chapbook, Little Girl Blue: Poems will be published in October
2021 (Host Publications).
Emily Ruth Rutter is an Associate
Professor of English at Ball State University. She is the author of Invisible
Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line(University Press of Mississippi, 2018), The
Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry(University of Alabama Press, 2018), and the forthcomingBlack Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum
Athletes and Artists (University of
Delaware/Rutgers University Press, 2021). Along
with Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner, and Darlene Anita Scott, she co-edited Revisiting
the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era
(Routledge, 2020).
Darlene Anita Scott’s
recent writing appears in Simple Machines,
Green Mountains Review, and Pen + Brush. Her art can be viewed in 805 Lit + Art, The West Review, and The
Journal ofCompressed Arts and her photography in Barren Magazine, Auburn
Avenue, and Persephone’s Daughters. Scott
is co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in
the Black Lives Matters Era and her debut poetry collection, Marrow, is forthcoming from University
Press of Kentucky in 2022.
Some of Richard Byrt’s work, as a published
poet, and for two LGBT+ history projects, explores reasons, individually and in
society, for offensive, discriminatory beliefs and actions. Writing about these
topics is not intended to cause hurt and offence (apologies if it does), but,
hopefully, increases his self-reflection and understanding.
Tanisha
Barrett is a mental health nurse,
delivering therapy and also teaching about diversity and difference. She is a
proud, black queer woman who is very passionate about dismantling systemic
inequalities. In her spare time, she writes poems about mental health, race,
sexuality and body image. Instagram @blacksugarising
https://www.blacksugarising.com
Paul Francis is a retired teacher living in Much Wenlock, Shropshire. He
is active as a writer and performer in the West Midlands poetry scene, and is
also the author of several pamphlets as well as Sonnets with notes (2019).
During lockdown he posted a sonnet a day, at http://www.paulfranciswrites.co.uk/paulfrancispoems?category=Sonnets
Ambrose Musiyiwa coordinates
Journeys in Translation, an international, volunteer-driven project that is
translating poems from Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge
(Five Leaves Publications, 2015) into other languages. He edited books that
include Black Lives
Matter: Poems for a New World
(CivicLeicester, 2020), Bollocks to Brexit: an Anthology of Poems and Short
Fiction (CivicLeicester, 2019), Leicester 2084 AD: New Poems about The
City (CivicLeicester, 2018) and Welcome to Leicester: Poems about The
City (Dahlia Publishing, 2016). He is the author of The Gospel According
to Bobba.
Over The Edge is inviting you to the June
Over The Edge: Open Reading on Zoom. Friday, June 25th, 8pm
Join The Over The Edge Zoom Meeting at
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7389013549
Meeting ID: 738 901 3549
Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing
financial support of the Arts Council,
Poetry Ireland, and Galway City Council.
