Four Poets: An Act of Witness and Reclamation

Abigail Chabitnoy earned her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University and was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Boston Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Nat Brut, Red Ink, and Mud City, and she has written reviews for Colorado Review and the Volta blog. She is an enrolled descendant of the Koniag Corporation and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. She grew up in Pennsylvania and currently resides in Colorado, where she is a research associate for a consulting firm specializing in supporting indigenous self-determination. In her debut poetry collection, How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan University Press), Chabitnoy addresses the lives disrupted by U.S. Indian boarding school policy.

Ashley M. Jones earned an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She was also a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award Recipient, a 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press, a founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts. She is the author of  Magic City Gospel and her latest collection, dark // thing (Pleiades Press) a multi-faceted work that explores the darkness/otherness by which the world sees Black people.

Darius V. Daughtry is a poet, playwright, director and educator who has dedicated much of his life to cultivating and inspiring young artists and thinkers in his native South Florida. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Art Prevails Project, a performing arts organization dedicated to expanding cultural conversation through theatrical performance, arts education, and community engagement. Darius has spearheaded literacy initiatives with NFL Hall-of-Famer Jason Taylor and with poet and actor, Omari Hardwick. Daughtry has been commissioned to write, perform, and conduct workshops for various organizations: The Poetry Foundation, O, Miami, City of Fort Lauderdale, Miami-Dade Schools, Broward Schools, and more. With And the Walls Came Tumbling (Omiokun Books), his debut collection, Daughtry, provides an introspective poetic memoir and sweeping cultural critique. Drawing inspiration from and paying homage to emcees and crooners alike, these poems move with a rhythmic language that makes heads nod and hearts skip beats.

t'ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in the African American Review, Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Obsidian, Poetry, Tin House, and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets Of Color. Her first collection, how to get over, won the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, published by Red Hen Press. In 2018, she won a Face Out Emerging Writers Award from the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses. t’ai freedom ford’s second collection of poems, & more black (Augury Press), is direct, ingenious, vibrant, alive, queer, & BLACK. By turns tough and sexy, wrapped up in the evolving language and sonics of life, these poems take their cue from Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets as they rhapsodize and dialogue with artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, and Wangechi Mutu, along with many other musicians, artists, and writers. The kinetic energy of ford’s words leap off the page in rebellious, stunning, and revelatory fashion—poems that mesmerize with sheer velocity and telling pauses.