Tag Archive for Phillis Wheatley

“Un-American”, “Conjure”, and “The Age of Phillis” Longlisted for 2021 PEN Book Awards

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We congratulate Hafizah Geter, Rae Armantrout, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who are all Longlisted for awards from PEN America.

PEN Open Book Longlist covers

Hafizah Geter’s debut poetry collection, Un-American, is Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. The PEN Open Book Award honors a work of fiction, literary nonfiction, biography/memoir, or poetry written by an author of color. The award was created by PEN America’s Open Book Committee, a group committed to racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities.

Geter’s collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you.

PEN/Voelcker Award Longlist book covers

We are also pleased to announce that Rae Armantrout’s Conjure and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis are both Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. The PEN/Voelcker Award honors a distinguished collection of poetry that represents a notable and accomplished literary presence.

Rae Armantrout has always taken pleasure in uncertainties and conundrums, the tricky nuances of language and feeling. In Conjure that pleasure is matched by dread; fascination meets fear as the poet considers an increasingly toxic world.

The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley’s “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade.

From PEN America’s press release:

The Longlists for its 2021 Literary Awards span 11 book awards and encompassing more than 125 writers and translators, representing the year’s most extraordinary literary talents. Over 80 judges have selected the Longlists, which are made up of categories including the novel, short story collection, translation, poetry, science writing, essay, biography, and more. (Read the full release here.)

Finalists for PEN America Literary Awards will be announced in February 2021.

#theageofphillis: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers talks latest book of poetry on Twitter

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On April 16, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers answered questions, on Twitter, about her new book, The Age of Phillis. Using the hashtag, #theageofphillis, readers tuned in to ask Jeffers about her process, inspiration, and relationship to documentary poetry. Below is a recap of the informative, heartfelt, sometimes humorous Q&A with Honorée.

“Jeffers pulls from historical archives to create more than 150 poems for glimpses of untold eighteenth century history from Wheatley a literary foremother, pioneer of ekphrastic poetics who writes through a diasporic life spanning Africa, Europe, and America. In The Age of Phillis Jeffers sheds imaginative light with poems that  bearing witness.”
—Katherine Ellington, writer for World House Medicine 

Listen to Ellington reading Wheatley’s poem “Imagination”.

         

Announcing “The Age of Phillis”

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“The Age of Phillis illuminates an unbroken lineage, the way one poet pays homage to another and keeps the continuum for which we are all indebted. This is a necessary and visceral book, that brings to life the fullness of Wheatley.” —Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahir Suite

In the shadow of the American Revolution, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry, Poems on various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). When Wheatley’s book appeared, her words would challenge Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Her words would astound many and irritate others, but one thing was clear: this young woman was extraordinary. Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood with her parents in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters, and her untimely death at the age of about thirty-three.

Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley’s “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley’s relationship to black people and their individual “mercies” is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history. Read a sample poem below:

mothering #1

Yaay, Someplace in the Gambia, c. 1753

after

the after-birth

is delivered

the mother stops

holding her breath

the mid-wife gives

what came before

her just-washed pain

her insanity pain

an undeserved pain

a God-given pain

oh oh oh pain

drum-talking pain

witnessing pain

Allah

a mother offers

You this gift

prays You find

it acceptable

her living pain

her creature pain

her pretty-little-baby

pain

HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS is a poet whose work examines culture, religion, history, and family. She is the author of four other books of poetry, including The Glory Gets, and the recipient of the 2018 Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. An elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, she teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma where she is a professor of English.

The Age of Phillis, forthcoming from Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

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Wesleyan University Press is pleased to announce we have secured the world rights to The Age of Phillis, a new volume of poetry by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who is represented by Sarah Burnes at The Gernert Company.

The Age of Phillis is the result of over a decade of research and contemplation by Jeffers. She draws on historical sources to take readers into the world of Phillis Wheatley, the first black American woman to publish a book. Wheatley published a volume of poetry entitled Poems of Various Subjects, Religion, and Morals on September 1, 1773. Jeffers imagines Wheatley’s thoughts as she navigates life as an intellectual, as an enslaved person, as an observant poet, and as a woman of African descent—eventually a freed woman, and wife, whose life would be cut short by poverty and illness.

Wesleyan plans for for a Spring 2020 publication date.

About the Author

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of four previous books of poetry including The Glory Gets, published by Wesleyan University Press in May 2015. Her other books are: The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State, 2000)—selected by Lucille Clifton for the Wick Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, Outlandish Blues (Wesleyan, 2003), and Red Clay Suite (Southern Illinois, 2007).

Her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, African American Review, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, Obsidian III, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and has been anthologized in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (2011) and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (Georgia, 2009). Her critical writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review and Virginia Quarterly Review. Jeffers has received numerous awards and honors, including a Witter Bynner Fellowship through the Library of Congress, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Julia Peterkin Award for Poetry, the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, a lifetime achievement honor, and an award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation for Women Writers. For her research on Phillis Wheatley, Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, a learned organization for the study of early American history and culture, to which fourteen US presidents have elected. She is a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.

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