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Cross-Ties
Poets :: writers :: ArtistS
Celebrate each other 

Sheree L. Greer :: Jasmin Lankford

2/22/2021

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 “We are flawed and perfect. We are the light after the blackout. We are all doing the best we can, and now have the chance to be better.” -- from “Voices on Addiction: None of This is Bullshit” published in The Rumpus.

Sheree L. Greer is a fabulous friend and mentor. Her writing is smooth, honest, and strong. I find myself returning to her essay in The Rumpus often. Sheree’s words are vulnerable and necessary. The way she stands firmly in her truth encourages me to keep standing in mine.

In addition to being a text-based artist, author, and educator, Sheree founded The Kitchen Table Literary Arts Center to showcase and support the work of Black women and women of color writers. This warm community celebrates the power of sharing stories and will definitely sharpen your writing skills. 
                                                 ~Jasmin Lankford
Sheree L. Greer
Sheree L. Greer
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Kristin Bock :: Diana Whitney

2/19/2021

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I first met Kristin Bock at a living room poetry reading on a dark January night. Years later she reached out to me and we became friends, sharing life stories and poems and favorite books. Meeting her eased the isolation I felt as a queer, rural writer raising children in a small town, struggling with depression and doubting my path. Our friendship gave me hope. And her poems haunted and stunned me with their precision and passion. I devoured her book, Cloisters, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and welcomed her insights about my work.

I just reread Cloisters under the covers by flashlight (my sacred time during this pandemic) and was mesmerized again by its emotional drive and spare, visceral imagery. Also its humor. “Watercolor Left in a Humid Kitchen” gets me every time. 

Kristin lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she got her MFA. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, including the Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, FENCE, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and Sixth Finch. Her fabulous new book, Glass Bikini, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press late in 2021. For a taste, here are four poems from that collection.

                                     ~Diana Whitney

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Ebukun Gbemisola Ogunyemi ::  Roseline Mgbodichinma

2/14/2021

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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
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Hillary McCullough :: Kristin LaFollette

1/30/2021

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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

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A post shared by Hillary Jones McCullough (@hillarymccullough)

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Eugenia Leigh :: Joan Kwon Glass

12/29/2020

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A man teeters at the edge

of the East River.

After his last deliberate swig, the man

lifts his bottle over his head as if considering

whether to sacrifice it. He hesitates.

Where is the memo about knowing

what to save, what to abort?

A woman clips a leash to a toddler, and I notice

a sign asking not to climb the rocks please.

Everyone warns us off the rocks.

What will keep us from the river?
                                                                   
                 ~from “Deciding Not to Drown Today”
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Eugenia Leigh

Eugenia Leigh is the Korean American author of the poetry collection Blood,
Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), winner of the Debut-litzer
Prize in Poetry and finalist for Yale’s Series of Younger Poets. I first
read Eugenia’s book in 2017, the year that I lost both my sister and her
11-year-old son (my nephew) to suicide. In the midst of acute grief and
PTSD, her poetry was one of the few things I could hear inside what felt
like a rubber bubble, keeping me safely apart from the world. As a
biracial, Korean American woman, I longed for poems that could reach me,
and I found them. In spite of the fact that South Korea has one of the
highest suicide rates in the world, the Korean American community as a
whole has long insisted on silence when it comes to suicide, abuse, and
violence. I have turned to Eugenia’s poetry in my own writing process, when
I’ve needed courage and inspiration. Her poetry sings, wails, and
whispers. Eugenia’s latest poem to be published, “Gold,” can
be found in the Summer, 2020, issue of Pleaides, as part of a folio of Korean
American poets, edited by E.J. Koh. “Gold” brings us full circle, back to
“Deciding Not to Drown Today” by exploring the reasons why we should step
back from those rocks, and stay. 
                                                             ~Joan Kwon Glass
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​Noʻu Revilla :: Charity Yoro

12/8/2020

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Picture​Noʻu Revilla
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 


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Kaity Altu :: Jerrice J. Baptiste

11/24/2020

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PictureKaity Altu
"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 

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Gabriela Yadegari :: Kolbe Riney

10/24/2020

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Gabriela Yadegari is an American artist studying at Bennington College in Vermont. She primarily works with auditory and visual media.
​

Gabriela and I grew up together as children. As we went our separate ways after school, I could not help but return to this art that she was putting forth. Her work has always been deeply focused on the texture of the world, both inside and outside her mind. It showcases things that are expected, and small, like digging in rich soil or a spread of oranges; but also things that are unexpected and live inside her mind, like the use of organic dyes to make modern art stamps and cat litter to create cracked textures. Her deep focus on these things is inspirational to my own work as a writer; it prompts us to think deeply about the textures and colors of our own lives, our own works. Poetry is a combination of both visual art and the written word, and Gabriela lives at this transition site as well.

                                                                    ~Kolbe Riney
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Gabriela Yadegari
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Kristin Robertson :: Jo Angela Edwins

10/4/2020

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He gassed them in his closet, then he pinned
            their wings, feathers splayed like pick a card,
 
any card. He posed them in plastic trees,
            and after his brush had cadmiumed the throat
 
of hummingbird, whitewashed
            the spoonbill, he roasted and swallowed
 
the loves of his life.
 
                                     ~ from “Audubon Ate His Birds”
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              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
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Maria James-Thiaw :: Jules Jacob

9/7/2020

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​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
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Maria James-Thiaw
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