Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by poet Teri Ellen Cross Davis to talk about her new poetry collection, a more perfect Union. Teri will be in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and Editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal.
RSVP below, and you’ll receive an email with the link for joining the chat via our video conferencing platform, Zoom, plus a reminder email on the day of the event. FREE and open to the public, all times Eastern. Limited space.
We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or online directly from the publisher.
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, winner of the 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize (February 2021, Mad Creek Books) and Haint, (2016, Gival Press) winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry.
She is the 2020 winner of the Poetry Society of America’s (PSA) Robert H. Winner Memorial Award and a finalist for the PSA’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She is the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts grant and a Meret grant from the Freya Project.
A Cave Canem fellow, she has been awarded residencies at the Community of Writers Workshop, Hedgebrook, the Soul Mountain Writer’s Retreat, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is on the Advisory Council of Split This Rock (a biennial poetry festival in Washington DC), a semi-finalist and finalist judge for the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Out Loud and a member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective.
Her work has been published in many anthologies including: Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, Growing Up Girl, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets & Emcees, The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and Not Without Our Laughter: poems of joy, humor, and sexuality. Her work can be read in the following journals: ArLiJo, Auburn Avenue, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Delaware Poetry Review, Fledging Rag, Gargoyle, Harvard Review, Kestrel, Kinfolks, Little Patuxent Review, Love’s Executive Order, MiPOesias, Mom Egg Review, Natural Bridge, North American Review, Pacifica Literary Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Ireland Review, Raising Mothers, Tin House, Torch, and Sligo Journal.
She was the HoCoPoLitSo (Howard County Poetry and Literature Society) Writer-in-Residence for 2019-2020 and an adjunct professor at George Washington University for 2019-2020. She is the Poetry Coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. and lives in Maryland with her husband, poet Hayes Davis and their two children.
About the Book
In the tender, sensual, and bracing poems of a more perfect Union, Teri Ellen Cross Davis reclaims the experience of living and mothering while Black in contemporary America, centering Black women’s pleasure by wresting it away from the relentless commodification of the White gaze. Cross Davis deploys stunning emotional range to uplift the mundane, interrogate the status quo, and ultimately create her own goddesses. Parenting, lust, household chores—all are fair game for Cross Davis’s gimlet eye. Whether honoring her grief for Prince’s passing while examining his role in midwifing her sexual awakening or contemplating travel and the gamble of being Black across this wide world, these poems tirelessly seek a path out of the labyrinth to hope.