Book Talk - Cord Swell

Cord Swell is a pilgrimage of poems, stories, and voices through the lives of three generations of Black women. In this debut volume, brittny ray crowell sifts through decades of obituaries, journals, and other ephemera to exhume the generations of her family from her hometown of Texarkana, Texas. She preserves her relatives’ stories in writing and in works of collage, a style of archive that layers the past and the present literally and poetically. This unique approach transforms Cord Swell into an altar, an artistically enshrined space where crowell communes with the past and looks to the future. 

brittny ray crowell (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of English at Clark Atlanta University. A recipient of a Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and the Lucy Terry Prince Prize, her poems have appeared in Split Lip, Copper Nickel, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her current research focuses on multimodality and intuitive witness in Black poetry…