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Overview
Anastacia Tolbert
is
a writer of poetry, prose, plays, and journalism. She is
a graduate of the Cave Canem program for African
American poets and holds an undergraduate degree in
English and Creative Writing from the University of
Missouri at Kansas City. She is currently Resident
Writer at the Seattle Girls School.
She received a 2004 San Diego
Journalism Press Club Award for her article “War Torn.”
In 2007, she wrote, co-produced and co-directed
GOTBREAST?, a documentary about women and body
image. She has taught writing, poetry and performance
workshops to students of all ages at schools, literary
centers, battered women’s shelters, youth camps, and
libraries.
Anastacia’s poetry and prose
have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Essence and San
Diego City Beat, as well as in the anthologies Cave
Canem XI, Alehouse
Journal, The Drunken Boat, Check the Rhyme: An Anthology
of Female Poets & Emcees (which
was nominated for the 2007 NAACP Award), and I
Woke Up and Put My Crown On: 76 Voices of African
American Women. She has performed her poetry in more
than fifty venues, including colleges, writers’
conferences, and art museums, and as a featured artist
on six radio stations.
more
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Shapezoids
By Anastacia Tolbert
what if people were
shapes
squares, circles & especially triangles
angular pinnacles sounding off like thumped
thimbles
inside an open space of pyramid & geometry
what if the equation were simple & you
were either/neither kite or cracker or apple
or toast or bagel
& no one cared if you fit
snugly inside a toaster & all the octagons
never stopped believing a mere trapezoid
could save you with the very silhouette of
her exhale. |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
posted 1 January 2012
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