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Alexis V. Jackson is a Philadelphia-born, San Diego-based writer, poet, and teacher whose work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Jubilat, The Amistad, La Libreta, Solstice Literary Magazine, and 805 Lit among others. Jackson earned her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Messiah University. She is a 2021 finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her debut poetry collection, My Sisters’ Country (2022), won the Koré Press’ first book prize. Jackson has served as a reader for Callaloo and Bomb Magazine, and lectures in the University of San Diego’s English Department. For more, visit https://www.alexisvjackson.com
In My Sister’s Country, Alexis Jackson artfully braids together a multi-vocal chorus of Black women’s voices across, over, under, and through time. From Gwendolyn Brooks to June Jordan to the Book of Genesis, Jackson’s poetry sizzles and samples with mischief. It’s gutbucket, daredevil, Double Dutch, next-generation sass. A mixtape of mothers and daughters, blood and beat, this book dances with ghosts. Jackson bends and breaks forms like the sonnet, pantoum, and zuihitsu and introduces the playlist poem as she explores the makings of Black girlhood and womanhood. Staying true to the beauties, traumas, moans and undoings found there, the poet invites readers to consider the ways Black women, who were once considered countryless property, made country out of and in one another, and asks the questions: What are the consequences? How terrifying and beautiful are they? How terrifying and beautiful is the rebuilding, the renaming, of country? Jackson confronts expectations put on Black women through time, family, patriarchy, and religion. “Christ is supposed to give me salvation for my soul,/ but what about my thighs, and my mouth, and my pancreas,” she writes. This is a book of the body, unbound by convention while creating entirely new ones.
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Komal Mathew is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Diode Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, Narrative,The New Republic, and others. She lives with her family in Smyrna, Georgia, where she is the co-founding editor of Josephine Quarterly. For more, visit https://www.komalmathew.com
For Daughters Who Walk Out Like Sons: In this spectacular debut, notions of what it means to be beautiful–both inside and out– get complicated with a refreshing vulnerability. Komal Mathew makes captivating poems bubbling over with uncommon wisdom and grace. Mathew’s poems yield a faith of transparency and yearning, a lyric pulse arisen from the longing of our souls to be clothed with eternity, our heavenly home: “Though my love for you didn’t end / because the singing ended, the lullaby / moved to a wind that promised a nest…” This lovely book is a festival of light infused with love, bejeweled by the elemental truths in this earthbound life of family, motherhood, and human desire: “Blessed be the one who hears you cry out / like a million pressed stones – / jasper, turquoise, emerald with gold – / and uncovers your breath of bees.
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Marianne Worthington is a poet, editor, and cofounder of Still: The Journal. She lives and teaches in southeastern Kentucky. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Grist, Cheap Pop, Appalachian Review, Feed, Ethel, Chapter 16, and other outlets. With Silas House she co-edited Piano in a Sycamore: Writing Lessons from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, and is author of a poetry chapbook Larger Bodies Than Mine, which won the Appalachian Book of the Year Award. For more, visit https://marianneworthington.com
Skillfully divided into three distinct yet harmonious parts, cantillating local, familial, and personal histories, The Girl Singer is a collection of lyrical and descriptive poems that offer unique insight on famous and infamous Appalachian tales from this life and the next. Part family history, part music, and part nature walk, The Girl Singer beautifully weaves Feminism, Appalachian culture, and country music into one thread. Worthington’s attentive eye and heart are reflected in the starkly striking and painful images she paints in the poems. Every poem, whether describing a connection with Appalachian wildlife, retelling the lyrics of a classic country tune, reflecting on the speaker’s bloodline, or giving voice to famous musical figures of the past, strikes a powerful chord and creates a sisterhood for singing old songs in new ways.
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Mildred Kiconco Barya is a writer and poet. She has written short-stories and essays for various publications, features and travel articles for newspapers. Her first collection of poetry titled: Men Love Chocolates But They Don’t Say won the National Award for poetry publication 2002. She is also the author of the poetry collections The Price of Memory and Give Me Room to Move My Feet. Barya is Assistant professor of Creative Writing and World Literature at University of North Carolina-Asheville. Learn more at http://mildredbarya.com/.
