Jasmine Reid is a transatlantic poet for the people. She is the author of Interlocutor Goddess (Autumn House Press, forthcoming), winner of the 2024 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Book Prize; and Deus Ex Nigrum (Honeysuckle Press, 2020). An MFA graduate of Cornell University and recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and Poets House, her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Kenyon Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Reid was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, where she is an assistant professor at NYU.
Fellowship Statement
My primary goal for this Fellowship is to complete work on a collection of poems figured out of the tranatlantic-transgender middle passage and wound, misassigned at birth, poems that rearrange the traumatic into the life-bearing, the cut into the invaginated. In plasticity and reconstruction, from wound to womb, I conceive new, liberative passage. So enacted: a fugitive fecundity that escapes the annihilative imagination of the bourgeois state unto revolutionary path and possibility. Through research on such defiant forms, phenomena, and ideation (consider the matsutake and the astronomic “perfect black body”), and the work of poets in revolutionary struggle, I will sharpen the poems’ political vision, formal invention, and improvisation. This sharpness will righteously ooze, draw blood from reader to rehydrate the knowledge that we are inseparable from land, soil, stars, and each other. Inner space pregnant with outer space: a poetry for the people to become earthlings, again.
