Crushed & Crowned Coming Out in Fall, 2023!

I am thrilled and grateful to share here that Crushed & Crowned, my fifth book of poems, will be published by FlowerSong Press in the Fall of 2023! Many thanks to Edward Vidaurre and the good people at FlowerSong Press for getting these poems into the world. FlowerSong Press has created some wonderful books and I am honored to put these poems in their able hands.

This new collection contains several elegies, a form that means a great deal to me. Crushed & Crowned opens with an elegy series honoring Echol Cole and Robert Walker. These two men were sanitation workers in Memphis, they were crushed to death in a trash truck in 1968, because Black workers could not ride in the cab. Their deaths sparked the “I AM A MAN” campaign for better working conditions and higher wages. This campaign also brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in 1968, where he would be assassinated.

Crushed & Crowned includes poems about murals, poems about teaching, as well as two lengthy poems honoring Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. This new book also contains a section of poems about the LGBTQ refugees in Block 13 of Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. These poems mean a great deal to me and I am so glad they will find their way into people’s hands.

I will be looking for reviews, readings, and other ways to support this new collection, so if you know of anyone who is scheduling readings for the Fall and Winter of 2023, please share my name and work with them.

Thank you for sharing my excitement about this new book of poems!