It was the winter of 2021 in the latest lockdown in Northern England. I was deep into therapy, grieving, and had started the rich seam of writing which would be the start of it all. Relatively new to social media, I saw a call out for Northern, working-class writers to submit a poem written in Northern vernacular. Somebody like me. From my background. It was rare and surprising. I’d been asked to take elocution lessons as a lecturer in English Literature and often damped down my flat Yorkshire vowels in the rarefied worlds of academia, then yoga, but this was something different. This was a call for me to be myself, to honour the culture and place I was from and more than that, to celebrate it.

My grandparents had been on my mind so a poem poured out in the inky light from the TV, written on the back of a newspaper. It was a tribute to their lives, their love for me and all they had meant, so the poem’s title was their address. I submitted it and forgot about it. As a new poet, I had no idea whether what I was writing had any value, I was just grateful that this specific and inclusive call-out had inspired me to write about my grandparents for the first time.

And that is how I met Rebecca Kenny.

The poem was accepted, not with a dry nod and direction for a short biography, but with warm, effusive, genuine feedback, warm as an Eccles cake, and oozing with all I had meant the poem to be. It gave me confidence, made me feel seen and valued, so I read further. Rebecca was the director of Bent Key Publishing, so named because she had been in an horrific car accident which left her dazed, hearing her own bones crack, her neck chip in two places, her pelvis and sternum break as the cold rain beat a tattoo on her face. She nearly died. When she eventually got back to her home, she found her front door key bent in her coat pocket; a symbol of all that would come after. New starts, risks, a new life carved out with bravery and generosity despite her broken body and traumatised mind. She was a gifted poet. She wrote an ebook The Girl Who Broke Her Back and her magnificent collection Crash & Learn as she recovered from her injuries. She didn’t stop at that. She founded her own publishing company with the aim of representing writers often marginalised from traditional publishing. She’d lost her job and had no government support but this is what she did at a time of great uncertainty for herself and during a global pandemic.

Her collection makes us all cry. There is pain, joy, grief, tiny moments in time peculiarly Northern which chimed at our hearts, these hearts being her team. The fragile but talented writers she has championed who have been brought together by her, lioness, fierce, cubs behind her every step. I had the confidence to submit the collection I had written to Bent Key Publishing and it was accepted. The joy of this and the warmth of the acceptance was an indescribable feeling. The dream of being a writer I had carefully shelved at the age of eight was alive again and more than this, I knew she thrived on this, making people feel appreciated and happy. She is a good person. We met for a Bent Key Showcase. I arrived just in time to see her opening set and stood transfixed as she performed without notes or hesitation. Her oratory filled the cloisters of the beautiful old church, our venue, and I knew, if I hadn’t known already, she was one of a kind. I went up to perform, faltering, and oh lord there’s a microphone. She adjusted it quietly and cheered me all the way. As she cheered all the poets and as she continues to release collection after collection for all the lost poets, despite the continued physical, mental and emotional fallout from the crash that nearly did for her. I’ll always be grateful we met.

                                                       ~Emma Conally-Barklem

In February 2020, I had the good fortune to spend two weeks at the Vermont Studio Center. It turned out to be their last residency session before the Covid lockdown forced them to close their doors, but we didn't know that then, and I was ignorantly happy to write all morning and hang out at meals and evenings with my new friend and housemate Vaune Trachtman. When I visited her studio, we laughed as we sipped gin from tiny paper cups meant for mixing chemicals. All around us, hanging from the walls on great sheets of heavy paper, was her work: gravure prints, layered black and white images that combined Vaune's photographs with snapshots her father had taken in the 1930s. The resulting images are haunting, surreal, and intimate, blurred with time and memory. Yet their details--a man's stare, a woman's profile, a boy's threadbare shirt--are so sharp they could cut you open. 

I'm lukcy to have had that time--one last pre-pandemic moment--to have worked among a community of writers and artists, and I'm so lucky to have met Vaune Trachtman and to have experienced her work. She takes my breath away.

                                       ~Juliana Gray 

​I heard Dilruba Ahmed’s work before I ever encountered it on the page, which seems fitting, given the masterful way she attends to sound and music in her work. She was reading poems that would become part of her debut collection, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf 2011), at a summer multi-genre reading at the low-residency program I was attending at the time as a (poet-disguised-as) fiction candidate. She leaned towards the microphone and, a stanza in, I felt the room lean forward.
 
A few months later, I would take leave from the program and I wouldn’t write anything for almost a decade, but I kept my memory of that reading as a bright spot and continued to seek out Ahmed’s work. In 2020, when the state of the world revealed/re-revealed poetry as an essential coping strategy, I picked up her second collection, Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020). 
 
Whether she’s writing about the personal, the environmental, or the political (and their various intersections), Ahmed’s work embodies a deeply sensory presence that echoes timelessly. Her attention towards the world is clear-eyed and piercing and (still, somehow) open-hearted. The range of her subjects and formal approaches diffuses texture, imagination, and surprise throughout her collections. 
 
I’ve also been lucky enough to experienced Ruba as a teacher (at Hugo House’s and Murphy Writing of Stockton University’s online classes) and I can confirm both her sharp insight and generosity. My work has been enriched by the time I’ve spent with hers. 

                                                                             ~Violeta Garcia Mendoza

I walked its length more than once, stopping to study the honeycomb and the delicate seed pod, to make out what one book that one card spoke of. There’s a blurry picture I took of the egg—what I think might have been a quail’s—and another from the end, showing the gentle curve of the cards that called up for me, then, memories of water and a pier stretching out into the distance. Now, when I think back, the cards, lined as they were, resemble the underside of a Browning Parasol mushroom.
 
Whiting’s work, overall, focuses on the environment, something that matters to me. Her framed pieces that use human anatomy textbook illustrations and geologic survey maps illustrate the connection we have with nature. As she writes on her website, “Our impact on the land affects human health since air pollution and disposed waste will ultimately lead back to us.” Her installation piece Deforestation is a room full of tree stumps made from vintage law books. Like Catalog, the tight packing of paper—its semblance to another form—readjusts our view and, more importantly, provokes us to think carefully about what we are doing to save this place we inhabit.
​
                                                                                             ~Kelly R. Samuels

Don’t
you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this
life born from one hungry animal, this whole,
new landscape, the course of the river changed

Camille T. Dungy, "Trophic Cascade" ​
Kenyon Review 

I encountered Madge Evers and her spore print art at a neighborhood festival a few years back. Looking at her ghostly, exuberant work stole my breath, and I knew I couldn't take it in the way I wanted to while standing under a makeshift tent at a folding table in the last minutes of a one-day event while my kids begged for popsicles. I pocketed her card and not long after she invited me to visit her home studio. 

Thi Bui's dynamite graphic memoir The Best We Could Do skyrocketed onto my all-time favorites list instantly: it's an intimate family story strung out on the pitiless frame of history, the way the membranous part of a dreamcatcher is stretched across its hard outer frame, such that every reader is drawn in -- implicated -- caught. Bui's visual art, not only in The Best We Could Do but also in her award-winning illustrations for the children's book A Different Pond (by poet and author Bao Phi), has a heartstrings-tugging watercolor-like tenderness: it's amazing to find an author so equally gifted with words and pictures. Many of us children of refugees have heard our parents tell stories bearing similarities to the tales Bui tells, but it takes talent to make the scenes spring to life the way she does, often with just a single thoughtfully chosen visual detail or scrap of dialogue. 

                                                       ~ Jenna Lê

I met Ebukun Gbemisola Ogunyemi when I got into SprinNG as a poetry mentee; she was my mentor and she taught me a lot about poetry (structuring, form and style) and writing in general. The most profound of it all is her ability to make me understand that I don't need to have any reservations or shame because my advocacy plays out in my writing, and at the same time I should explore diverse forms and not box myself. She taught me to find my voice and own it and above all because of her, I know that my art cannot be home for all; I have an audience and I can't possibly please everybody or cater to everything in my work and that's okay. I am completely smitten by her. She's great!

Ebukun is a creative writer, researcher, editor and content writer with more than four years experience in creating and writing stellar, original and engaging contents for digital and non-digital brands such as African freelancers, glance magazine, The odyssey etc. Ebukun is also the manager of the SprinNG Women's Authors prize (the_swapng) a literary award committed to promoting and empowering female Nigerian Authors by investing yearly in the buying and distribution of a select author's book.

                                                  ~Roseline Mgbodichinma

I was introduced to artist Hillary Jones McCullough by a mutual friend after Hillary indicated she was looking for a writer to help her develop a grant application. We teamed up to work on the application, and I ended up helping Hillary develop her personal website in the process, learning quite a bit about her work with photography and digital storytelling. Primarily a photographer, Hillary's work focuses on conveying the complexity of the human experience. Her current project, which is titled The Birthmother Series, uses photography and interviews to tell the stories of women who made adoption plans for their children. Follow McCullough on Instagram @hillarymccullough 

                               ~Kristin LaFollette

your black inscriptions cite a kino lau,
whose feathered wingspan, nighttime eyes & pun-
ishing beak comprise mo‘okū‘auhau.
                                           – kino
​
​Noʻu Revilla is a poet from Maui, "invested in creative projects grounded in aloha ʻāina and intersectional justice and often center discussions of gender, sexuality, belonging, and Indigeneity." I had the honor of meeting Noʻu briefly at my first AWP conference in Portland in 2019, where I was struck by her magnetic presence on a panel of (equally phenomenal) Indigenous writers. Revilla's poetry is seductive and sonically fluid and anchored in the na'au place with great love & attention given to her mo'oku'auhau, her lineage. I find myself, even now, thinking back to her breathtaking performance last spring –– a compelling collaboration of photography and poetry, a love letter to both the photographer and Revilla's ʻaumakua, the lizard. 

Noʻu Revilla's chapbook, Say Throne, was published by Tinfish Press in 2011, and her latest chapbook, Permission to Make Digging Sounds, was published in Effigies III in 2019.

                                                                                                             ~ Charity Yoro 

"Her voice echoing through my mind like the fluttering of a thousand butterflies, light and airy. I can feel the smile in it as one feels the gentle breeze flowing through a field of poppies." 
                                                       ~Kaity Altu 


Kaity Altu and I met at a new writer's group at one of our local libraries. I sat next to her bold, humorous self. Her imagination caught my attention. Kaity responded to each prompt with great sensitivity, and a colorful attitude, being from Puerto Rico. Her writing of short stories stirs curiosity. They often touch on LGBTQ issues. Her talent to keep a reader interested comes naturally and is very authentic. Kaity is a writer to keep an eye open for success. 
                                                                                                           ~Jerrice J. Baptiste 

              Kristin Robertson

I first met Kristin Robertson in a graduate poetry course we both took from Marilyn Kallet (another poet well worth knowing) at the University of Tennessee. This was more than twenty years ago, but even then, her way of capturing a transformative moment in all its human strangeness while connecting it beautifully to natural images struck me as a talent few of us will ever achieve. Her book Surgical Wing won the Alice James Book Award and was published in 2017, and it illustrates the poet’s fondness of the bird as a symbol for a variety of human experiences, including the contradictory phenomena of freedom and entrapment. Her poems are at times mystical and mysterious, at times grounded in earthy worlds of loss, business, food and drink and cigarettes, but the music of her language and the surprising trajectories of each poem often leave the reader stilled and stunned, like a bird tossed by a storm.

                           ~Jo Angela Edwins

​They can’t feel the heart of our people
beating on 116th or
understand the holy words
of El Shabbazz
 
that live in the God-coiled ropes
that crown my head,
and they don’t know my soul
 
 
                 From “Beyond the Brownstones”
                 by Maria James-Thiaw
                               
 
I met Maria in 2015 while we were attending the Virginia Center for the Creative Art’s Poetry Workshop in France. Maria had begun interviewing older women for her remarkable American Griot Project, a historical account of first-hand experiences during the era of Jim Crow laws and the Civil Rights Movement. Since 2015, Maria has taken the interviews and stories “…of learning about race and privilege and experiencing second class citizenship and love across color lines…” and translated them into a choreopoem brought to the stage in the theatrical production, Reclaiming My Time: An American Griot Project.
 
Maria James-Thiaw is an award-winning poet, performer, playwright, and educator. She’s the author of “Talking White” and her poetry and reviews appear in journals such as New Letters, Cutthroat, and Black Magnolias.
                                            ~​Jules Jacob

Arriel Vinson is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who describes her writing as: "about being young, black, and in search of freedom." Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets 2020, Best of the Net 2019, and a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in Kweli Journal, Catapult, BOOTH, Cosmonauts Avenue, Waxwing, and Electric Literature–just to name a few.

I had the good fortune and delight to read alongside her at feminist community bookstore and cafe, Cafe Con Libros' Renegade Reading Series in Brooklyn, New York, last year. I was immediately swept away by her powerful delivery and language. Her recent poem, "Minnesota," which is after Morgan Parker with a line from a Najma Sharif tweet, operates as a kind of time capsule of how I've been left feeling as a Black woman in America these past few weeks.

Opening lines:

The world is burning again. I haven’t stomached a full meal in days. Justice is an
imaginary word. The police kneel on necks and white people say “but.” I am required to
work when Black people are dying. I send emails as Black people set shit on fire. I can’t
grieve something that never stops.

The speaker here is honest, she is fearless, and she does not shy away from her own emotions or overwhelm or even indulgence, which may come off as surprising to some. Vinson's tone and masterful craft manages to do what countless news stories, emails, phone conversations, and group chats have failed–to take an unforgettable snapshot of one woman from a generation at the precipice of a world ending, and another possible, more hopeful one emerging from its ashes. "Hear we shall overcome. Hear burn, baby, burn."

S. Erin Batiste, Fairlies feature, July, 2020