Three poets celebrate Black womanhood, weaving joy and elegy together in their verse. In Makeshift Altar, Amy M. Alvarez urges “Let survivor’s bones grow fat with sweet.” Cynthia Manick declares in No Sweet Without Brine, “I want us living, not just alive.” “I am done telling the kinder story. I am a myth of my own making,” January O’Neill tells us in Glitter Road.
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Amy M. Alvarez is the author of Makeshift Altar and the co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology. She has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, VONA, Macondo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Furious Flower Poetry Center. In July of last year, she was inducted as an Affrilachian Poet. Selected as one of 2022’s Best New Poets, her work has appeared in nationally and internationally recognized literary journals including Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Rattle, Colorado Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Amy was born in New York City to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents. She taught English, History, and Humanities courses at public high schools in the Bronx, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts. She currently teaches at West Virginia University.
Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine, which received five stars from Roxane Gay and was selected as a New York Public Library Best Book of 2023; editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry; winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry; and author of Blue Hallelujahs. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Château de la Napoule among other foundations. For ten years she curated Soul Sister Revue, a quarterly reading series that promoted poetry as storytelling and featured emerging poets, poet laureates, and Pulitzer Prize winners. Her poem “Things I Carry into the World” was made into a film by Motionpoems and has debuted on Tidal for National Poetry Month. A storyteller and performer at literary festivals, libraries, universities, and museums, Manick’s work has also featured in VOICES, an audio play by Aja Monet and Eve Ensler’s V-Day, the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus and other outlets. She currently serves on the editorial board of Alice James Books. She lives in New York but travels widely for poetry.
January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road, Rewilding, Misery Islands, and Underlife. From 2012—2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. Her poem, “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial,” was a co-winner of the 2022 Allen Ginsberg Poetry award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. She currently serves as the 2022—2024 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). A Virginia native, O’Neil earned her BA from Old Dominion University and her MFA from New York University. She lives in Beverly, MA.