Description:
My Afmerica explores the tensions and complexities of interracial family relationships in a nation still divided by racism and still haunted by its history of enslavement.
Brief description: Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. Her third poetry collection, A Black Doe in the Anthropocene: Poems, is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky in spring 2025 and chronicles her family's history of enslavement in America. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her poetry collection My Afmerica: poems (Trio House Press, 2019), selected by poet Sun Yung Shin. Her prose, Survivor's Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity, received a 2022 Next Generation Finalist Indie Book Award. White is co-editor of the new anthology Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (Pangyrus, 2023), which writer Camille Dungy refers to as "a blessing and a balm." Recent work also appears in the anthology Why I Wrote This Poem: 62 Poets on Creativity and Craft (McFarland, 2023). She has received scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Tupelo Press MASS MoCA. She is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University.
Review Quotes:
"My Afmerica is a restless book, wandering through an America that cannot be separated from its African American people, where to be black is to be considered a body potent with the crimes of treason, with the crime of not being pure/white, traceable longer back 'than Whitman's leaves of grass.' "신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin, author of Rough, and Savage and 2018 Trio House Press Contest Judge
"My Afmerica forces us to consider the cost of history, brutality, racism, accompanied by documented facts. In doing so, her work makes our bodies react with a nod, a jaw clench, a curse, a sigh, a held breath. White's art is as evident as her keen use of form translates what the textbooks often miss. There is no overstating that My Afmerica is one of those books that should be studied as history, poetry, theory, and art. Artress Bethany White's second collection of poetry should be committed to memory and passed down as a living, poetic, historical document."--Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
"In verse both free and deftly formal, Artress Bethany White unflinchingly mines the notion of family: biological, blended, constructed and decidedly American. She takes no prisoners, or perhaps takes us all prisoners, kicking into the necessary and discomfiting discourse of who we truly are--and how we are tied together in awful, and also surprisingly beautiful, ways."--Danielle Legros Georges, Poet Laureate, City of Boston