Ashanti Anderson
We are so excited to start working with award-winning Black Queer poet, playwright, and screenwriter, Ashanti Anderson.
In her work, Ashanti engages with various forms of resistance and resilience. She relentlessly seeks to articulate the full capacity of feeling of those who have been Othered, particularly black womxn. Ashanti challenges dehumanizing narratives by highlighting the agency and autonomy of the oppressed.
Ashanti’s work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications, including POETRY Magazine, World Literature Today, and Psychology of Music. She was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown as the winner of the 2018 Tennessee Williams Festival Poetry Contest. Her short film script, “Study Room,” won the Haley’s Flight Short Film Script Competition in 2017. Ashanti currently lives in south Texas.
Ashanti’s debut poetry chapbook, Black Under, which won the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition, is forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press in Fall 2021.
Black Under
Winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition
The poem from which Black Under derives its title opens with a resounding declaration: “I am black and black underneath.” These words are an anthem that reverberates throughout Ashanti Anderson’s debut short collection. We feel them as we navigate her poems’ linguistic risks and shifts and trumpets, as we straddle scales that tip us toward trauma’s still-bloody knife in one turn then into cutting wit and shrewd humor in the next. We hear them amplified through Anderson’s dynamic voice, which sings of anguish and atrocities and also of discovery and beauty.
Black Under layers outward perception with internal truth to offer an almost-telescopic examination of the redundancies—and incongruences—of marginalization and hypervisibility. Anderson torques the contradictions of oppression, giving her speakers the breathing room to discover their own agency. In these pages, declarations are reclamations, and joy is not an aspiration but a birthright.
Stay tuned for updates!
