Migration Letters

Migration Letters pulls heavily from the poet’s place in her family, communities, and the world at large. Testifying to growing up Black in Philadelphia on the periphery of the civil rights and Black Power movements, each poem builds upon an inheritance of voices: a panoramic perspective of an Easter Sunday service in a Black church, an account of psychic violence in a newly integrated school, the collective voices of a beauty salon’s patrons fragmenting into memories of urban neighborhoods that have faded over time—“a long-breath song of Black witness, missed kisses, and love’s labors lost, longed for, and remembered.” (Jabari Asim)

Nzadi Keita is a poet, essayist, scholar, and educator. Her collection Brief Evidence of Heaven: Poems from the Life of Anna Murray Douglass (Whirlwind Press, 2014) was a finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared widely, including on public television and in such anthologies as Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (2001), Beyond the Frontier: African-American Poetry in the 21st Century (2002), and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (2012). Keita served as an adviser to the documentary “BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez,” and has collaborated with several organizations, including the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Rosenbach Museum, Moonstone Arts Center, and the Germantown Arts Roundtable. She is a Cave Canem alum and a professor of creative writing and literature at Ursinus College.

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