Women to Watch: Award-Winning Poetry Debuts

Safia Elhillo’s The January Children mythologizes family histories until they break open, using them to explore aspects of Sudan’s history of colonial occupation, dictatorship, and diaspora. Magic City Gospel by Ashley M. Jones is a love song to Birmingham that takes readers on an historical, geographical, cultural, and personal journey through Alabama. In A Lesser Love, E. J. Koh’s poetry is born from the pain of immigrant parents, becoming an inheritor of Korea’s violent history. In Simulacra, Airea D. Matthews speaks emphatically from a racialized America, where trajectories of joy and exploitation are constrained by differentials of privilege and modes of communication.

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