Augury Books is delighted to announce our 2019 titles! Congratulations to t’ai freedom ford whose poetry collection & more black, chosen from our January Open Reading Period, will be published in the spring, and Arisa White, whose hybrid-memoir Who’s Your Daddy? will be published in the fall.
This year we received over 550 submissions during our open reading period and were thrilled to discover so many manuscripts of great promise. We commend the many talented authors who sent us their work and are grateful for the opportunity to read their manuscripts!
About the author:
t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The African American Review, Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Tin House, Obsidian, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. Winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, her first poetry collection, how to get over is available from Red Hen Press. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.
About the book:
From the author: & more black is a collection of what ford calls “Black-ass sonnets” that take their cues from Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets. For ford, the word “American” conjures the spirit of her ancestors. In that way, the poems are rebellious, outspoken and, as she says, “take no shit.” They investigate Black art, Black bodies, Black sexuality, and Black language, unapologetically and with a capital B.
About the author:
Cave Canem graduate fellow Arisa White is the author of Post Pardon, Hurrah’s Nest, A Penny Saved and Black Pearl. Her book You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened was nominated for the 29th Lambda Literary Award and the chapbook “Fishing Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates cultural events and artistic collaborations that center narratives of queer and trans people of color. She serves on the board of directors for Nomadic Press and is an assistant professor at Colby College. arisawhite.com
About the book:
Arisa White’s Who’s Your Daddy?, a hybrid memoir combining poetry and creative nonfiction, is a meditation on paternal absences, intergenerational trauma, and toxic masculinity. Who’s Your Daddy? asks us to consider how the relationships we are born into can govern us, even through absence, and shape the dynamics we find and forge as we grow. White lyrically moves across distance and time, from Brooklyn to California to Guyana. Her book enacts rituals that plumb the interior reaches of the heart to assemble disconnected and estranged parts into something whole, tender, and strong.