We Have Work to Do: MLK Day 2023
94 years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr. was born. After a quiet childhood, protected by his family and church from most of the South’s brutality, he would go on to live one of the most consequential lives of the 20th century. His ability to read the world’s economic and racial crises, its spiritual emptiness,…
Christmas Eve, Humility, and the Return of Light
On the East coast of the United States, where I live, these last days of December are dark. It’s not fully light until around 8:00 in the morning and it’s dark before 5:00 in the evening. We just passed the Winter Solstice three days ago so we are, quite literally, in the darkest days of…
The Smallness of Winter
I wonder what to call it. Winter’s smallness? The paucity of winter? The poverty of winter? I think smallness works. Winter brings with it a kind of smallness, a shrunken quality that, next to the lushness of summer and spring, appears diminished. If summer is rich, winter is poor. If summer feels robust, winter feels…
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…
An Open Letter to Americans on Immigration
Dear Americans: Raise your hand if you chose your birthplace. I see no hands going up. Raise your hand if you earned, paid for, negotiated to be born in the United States. Again, no hands. I am not trying to be obnoxious. But the questions above mean to assert a simple, clear, but often ignored…
Poems of Memory & Sorrow- CROSSING THE RIFT: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 and its Aftermath
I once thought Lucille Clifton was the only American poet who wrote anything worth reading about 9/11/2001. For awhile, she was. Her simple, searing poems moved me in a world that had gone mad with patriotism, anger, and revenge. Years later, I was at St. Mary’s College of Maryland for a reading, where Clifton taught…
Pamela Uschuk’s REFUGEE – Poems of Beauty & Anger
Pamela Uschuk is, in my view, one of our country’s best poets. Her new book, REFUGEE, shows precisely why. Her poems rise up from careful craft, scattering beauty, detailed descriptions, merged with an anger at injustice and a persistent hope for the world that we could create. Her insistence, that her poems are not just…
Frederick Douglass: The American Founder
He was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, approximately seventy miles from Washington, D.C. His mother was sent to a neighboring plantation shortly after his birth, he recalled never seeing her in the light of day. He endured the horrific poverty of enslavement as a child, never having clothing for the lower half of…
Block 13 Kakuma Refugees Need Your Help
These people are the most vulnerable refugees in the world. I have been in touch with people here for over a year. I know some of them. They have become my friends. Here are some basic facts about their situation. I hope you will read this and consider taking action. As of this writing, June…
One Million Lives Lost
This is heartbreak. This is sorrow. This is fury. Today is May 13, 2022 and sometime in the next day or so, the United States will record one million lives lost to Covid-19. Scientists agree that the true death count is far greater. But this is the official number, the total of reported deaths caused…
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Joseph Ross 