Lovers & Friends,
What’s good, babylove? We are almost a month into the new year & it is NEW YEAR-ING, honey. Idk about y’all, but my January came in like a wrecking ball & I’ve never been so hard in luck for making it this far.
To folk who are new to this: hello! Thanks for joining my monthly journey. To folk who are true to this: you know the deal. I’m coming into January’s newsletter with thoughts, & a lesson plan based on something I may or may not have written. Who knows! But first, KB updates.
My debut full-length poetry collection, Freedom House, is available for preorder NOW !!!!!! Getchu one from the publisher (it comes with a free e-book if you order here!), or Bookwoman, or Black Pearl Bookstore, or anywhere else you get books. <3
The first blurb for Freedom House dropped, & it’s from Cameron Awkward-Rich! This is one of my favorite writers, so I’m VERY honored & grateful. Read it here.
Freedom House has already gotten an interview! See me talk about the process of writing it, the necessity of writing about anti-Blackness/transness, & more with the Austin Chronicle here.
I’m tryna go on tour again from April-December 2023! Check out my offerings & book me directly here.
If you haven’t already heard…. I won this thing called an NEA grant. It is quite literally the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me !!!!!!!! Read my musings on what this means to me/Texas/my people (you included) here.
Other amazing news: my chapbook How To Identify Yourself With a Wound is a 2023 American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book !!!! What !!!!! I feel the way Drake must’ve felt when he made a milli off a mixtape (though I am still very much anti-Drake right now). I’m so glad this baby book did the things it did (1k+ sold! my first tour! now this!), & I thank it for the things it had/will teach me.
PEN America is still taking applications for its Emerging Voices program. If you qualify, you should apply!!! I am not kidding when I say it is one of the reasons why I know anything about the publishing world, & why I even believed in myself enough to write & send out essays (I now have an amazing agent & a forthcoming memoir with Knopf). It’s one of the few programs out there really investing in marginalized writers. You can apply here.
Do you know young people in grades 8-12 who live in Texas? If so, tell them about the inaugural What Juneteenth Means To Me Poetry Contest! Spearheaded by 2021-22 Texas Poet Laureate Cyrus Cassells, this contest aims to encourage young Texan writers to explore the events that make this day in Texas & American history such a stirring & significant one. First place gets $500, & all 10 finalists get flewed out to Austin for an award ceremony! Get more information (& apply) here.
I’ve got a new poem out (thanks Poet Lore)! This one explores chosen family, Penn Badgley, & more. Read it here.
Here’s some hot pics of me from a show. Muchas gracias to @queeriesandmore for them.
Freedom House has a playlist! Stream some of the songs that influenced my writing process (& just gain another chill study/coworking playlist) here.
That’s all my updates (for now). Thanks for reading & supporting me!
Moving on. Because y’all are my friends (& lovers, hey gaby) I’m letting you in on a little secret: I plan to make some lesson plans & prompts based on Freedom House! Yay! Because access means a lot to me, I’m picking poems that have both audio & text available online. My lesson plans aim to give teachers, educators, & people trying to speak to others about poems ideas of how to facilitate conversations as they relate to poems in Freedom House. They are in no way meant to be an end-all-be-all for how these poems should be taught (one thing I love about teachers & educators around the globe is that they’re creatives as well!), so take all of these things as exactly what they are: my perspective on a couple of poems that happened to come from me. Once things leave my conscience & enter the public domain, it is up to the reader/listener to get whatever they need from what I say. To that end, this lesson plan that I’m sharing with you is a starting point for those curious about where to start on some of my well-known pieces, as well as those near & dear to my heart. If you do plan to use this or something similar to it, credit me as the creator of this lesson, please. Smooches, & good luck building learning communities this year!
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Teaching “Black Life circa 2029”
Link to video and text:
Synopsis: “Black Life circa 2029” is a poem I wrote after a rather unnecessarily tense interaction with a police officer in Austin, TX in 2019. It came to me after having to sit through at court for an offense I didn’t even make, and reflecting on the state of relations between Black people and police in the United States. There are many, many statistics that indicate things that I experienced: Black people are racially profiled, incarcerated, and killed for simply being Black in the U.S., and those experiences often start with an officer in a uniform paid for by the city in less-than-united states. This poem keeps that knowledge in mind while creating a new scenario where Black people don’t live with those worries.
Before Reading
Share a content warning for the mention of police brutality and a brief mention of sexual content.
It’s rather important that students are primed with knowledge on relations between Black people and police in the U.S. Here’s a good source. After this is given, have people look at these images and answer the following questions (also disclose that there will be no grading of their responses, and there is no wrong/right answer. Just be honest):
What is your immediate emotional reaction? Physical reaction?
What do you think is happening here?
What in the picture supports your idea of what’s happening?
I would then go into something about bias, and how our biases inform how we intake information, and how police officers do their jobs.
After Reading
To spur conversation and reflection, start with three or more of these questions:
What are your initial reactions? What words or phrases stick out to you?
How does this poem make you feel? Why might that be?
How does time work in this poem?
This poem names specific things as wants for themselves and Black people in the future. What is the significance of the things that they name (AKA: why do you think they named these things and not others)?
This poem has stanzas that change justification. Why might they have wanted the poem to look like this?
What is still left to do– in the world– after this poem? What do you feel called to do?
If teaching a craft class, maybe create questions based on the poem’s use of adjectives, rhyme, and/or line breaks.
Prompt
What do you want your life – and the lives of people you love – to look like in 10 years? What is different between now and then (AKA: if we woke up in your ideal life, how would we know it’s different)? What is needed in order to get to this place?
Alt prompt: start a poem with the phrase “I have a room.” The poem must be about the future in some way.
Further reading
Here are some poems that dive into similar topics as this poem:
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Aaaaand that’s it! I hope this newsletter is finding you somewhere cozy, without worry in your pretty/handsome/precious little head, holding on to whatever hope you have for a healthy Black/queer/trans/you-life. I hope the biggest stressor in your life is figuring out when Beyoncé will drop the tour dates. Surely she knows we’d like to plan out our summers.
Till next time!
Love, Peace, & Chicken Grease,
KB