Fresh Milk in collaboration with the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin is pleased to launch their first international residency partnership, and welcomes US-based poet drea brown to the platform between April 19 – May 10, 2017.

About drea brown:

Originally from St.Louis, drea brown is currently a PhD candidate in African and African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin. Her work has appeared in a variety of literary journals most recently Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander and Southern Indiana Review. drea is also the winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press poetry chapbook competition judged by Douglas Kearney. Her chapbook dear girl: a reckoning was released in 2015.

Excerpt from research statement:

My research explores Black women poets’ use of grief and memory as devices to reconstruct cultural histories and subjectivity. I posit this remembering often calls for other ways of knowing that defy Western logic and linearity and instead privilege ideas of the sacred, collapsed notions of time, and lifted veils between worlds of the living and dead. I offer that to take up the task of remembering and revision, black women poets must confront hauntings of a racial and sexualized past that continually imprint on the present. Using a black feminist methodology I apply close readings and formal analysis that take into account lived experience and social, emotional and spiritual climates as conditions of lyric construction. Through this I demonstrate how ghosts in this poetic lineage are not just deceased or missing persons; they represent evidence of injustice and unrest, serving as erasures or reminders of what is not there but should be. Though haunting is frightening, ghosts are not always malicious, and at times are evidence of divine manifestation or future possibility. I position black women’s poetry as sites of haunting that bear indelible markings of grief in memory, arguing that they make a unique contribution to the genre of elegy.

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This residency is supported by the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies