SOREN LIT

Khalisa Rae is a poet and journalist in Durham, NC that speaks with furious rebellion. She is the author of Ghost in a Black Girl's Throat (Red Hen Press 2021). Her essays are featured in Autostraddle, Catapult, LitHub, as well as articles in B*tch Media, NBC-BLK, and others. Her poetry appears in Frontier Poetry, Florida Review, Rust & Moth, PANK,  Carousel, HOBART, among countless others. She is the winner of the Bright Wings Poetry contest, the Furious Flower Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, and the White Stag Publishing Contest, among other prizes. Currently, she serves as Assistant Editor for Glass Poetry and co-founder of Think in Ink and the Women of Color Speak reading series. Her second collection Unlearning Eden is forthcoming from White Stag Publishing in 2022. Follow here at @k_lisarae on Twitter.

Find more information here: khalisarae.com

GUEST: Khalisa Rae, Author of Ghost in a Black Girl's Throat

SOREN LIT podcast host & Editor: Melodie J. Rodgers

www.sorentlit.com

Brooke Dupree is a future memoirist and an English instructor at Greenville Technical College in

Greenville, South Carolina where her passion is teaching entry level reading and composition.

Brooke has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of South Carolina, a Masters in

Writing from Coastal Carolina University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens

University in Charlotte. She enjoys spending time with her family and drinking wine with her

friends. Brooke lives in Easley, South Carolina with her husband and daughter.

Guest: Brooke Dupree- SOREN LIT Summer issue 2021

SOREN LIT podcast host: Melodie J. Rodgers

www.sorenlit.com

SOREN LIT Podcast- Summer issue 2021. www.sorenlit.com

Podcast Host and Founding Editor, Melodie J. Rodgers

Leslie Peterson

Leslie Peterson grew up in rural middle Georgia, and lives there still, working for a local non-profit and trifling occasionally with poetry and stories. When she's not working or writing, she can be found wrangling a plethora of creatures from cats to quail or coaxing her hazard garden to grow...

i, too, collect bones

by Leslie Peterson

if it doesn't fit,

force it into the joint.

but I digress—first,

you must excavate.

golden relics,

samite,

red mud, hydria,

hercules beetle horns,

shrike wings,

harvestmen fangs and legs

that still writhe after death.

sweep it all away

and dig up the bones

of your mothers.

the teeth of a woman

who stood before the mastodon,

spear in hand,

screaming hoarse triumphs.

the humerus of she

who stood with sword of iron

between intruder and heir,

trembling in fear.

the ossicles that listened

on the edge of the bluff

to the wild ocean roar

and dove into the roiling foam

like a bird of prey

and came up for salty air—

despite

despite

despite

—and did it with a laugh,

for spite.

do not let them rest.

build yourself from their spines and

skint-bare knuckles, and,

let them haunt you.

SOREN LIT Podcast- Episode #3

Podcast Host & Founding Editor, Melodie J. Rodgers

Aanika Eragam - Summer Issue 2021

Aanika Eragam is a rising senior at Milton High School in Milton, Georgia. She is the 2021 Atlanta Youth Poet Laureate, and her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Bennington College, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has been published in Teen Vogue and Atlanta Magazine, among others. Outside of writing, she is passionate about history and politics.

ON HOME (OR THE LACK THEREOF) by Aanika Eragam

Here,

I do not know who I am.

An American, I proclaim,

In the dry, carpet fiber syllables

Falling like maple leaves from

My accentless tongue.

It’s scary carrying culture in this country.

I remember the time I wore a kurta

To school and got teased mercilessly

By incarnadine children who bottled

Venom in their veins and ice in their eyes.

Last month, another set of snake tongues yelled

“Fuck Indians!” while my mother and I

crossed the street. To them, our fear was funny.

To them, our fear is always funny. I think it’s funny

how quickly this melting pot reached its boiling point.

I think it’s funny how quickly I learned to hide my dal rice

and starve silently at lunch instead. Mother would hold up my

Untouched lunchbox with shaking hands, fury

Rolling off her in heat waves, ask me if

We should leave, go back, her eyes pooling

Over like the village well, fists grasping

At my arms like chipped rocks.

No, I would say,

This is home.

But the words still felt

Stale on my tongue.

There,

Everyone tells me who to be.

Grandmother balks at my hairy knees

and potato-skin arms,

Tells me to cover up, gives me a long-sleeved

kurta and leggings suited for hibernation,

As if the raging heat only applies to the boys,

Who choke on dust and smog

Untangling the village labyrinth.

Girls in two braids even like rice crops

invite me to play.

They ask me what it's like in America.

They laugh each time I attempt to speak in our mother tongue,

and I realize to them, our language is more sacred

than the air we breathe.

I feel ashamed. I feel like a butcher

flattening each syllable to make it palatable.

I feel that there, too, I am a spectacle.

There too, I only fit in when my mouth is shut.

But these girls, they smile like me,

and I want them to want me.

The next day, Mother

Packs up the tattered suitcase

Smelling of jalebi and jaggery.

I tell her I want to see the girls again and she

says no, we are leaving soon anyway.

I don’t want to leave, I tell her,

This is home.

But the crows chuckle from

The telephone line and the

Thunder cracks out a roar.

In the end,

America tells me I’m Indian

And India tells me I’m American

And when I try to be both I

Find out that I am neither,

Too foreign to be native so I

Must only be alive in the ocean-clad

Expanse between two countries,

My mother’s womb

My only home.

SOREN LIT Summer Issue 2021: www.sorenlit.com

SOREN LIT Podcast Host and Founding Editor, Melodie J. Rodgers

Episode#1- Shanna Greene Benjamin 

Shanna Greene Benjamin is a biographer and scholar who studies the literature, lives, and archives of Black women. Dr. Benjamin earned her Ph.D. in English and M.A. in Afro-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; she received a B.A. in English from Johnson C. Smith University—a historically Black college in Charlotte, North Carolina—where she was class valedictorian. A one-time professor and associate dean at Grinnell College and the former director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program there, Dr. Benjamin is a member of the 2015-2016 HERS class—a program administered by the Higher Education Resource Service that develops women leaders in higher education—and a 2018 graduate of the Council of Independent Colleges' Senior Leadership Academy.

Dr. Benjamin has published on African American literature and Black women's intellectual history in African American Review, MELUS, a/b: Auto/Biography, Studies in American Fiction, and PMLA. Her book, Half in Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay, is forthcoming from UNC Press (April 12). Through her coaching and consulting firm, FireStarter, and her First Book at Mid-Career Institute, Dr. Benjamin lives out her passion for giving post-tenure faculty the strategies and support they need to achieve professional goals that reflect personal, not institutional, priorities. A Mellon Mays undergraduate fellow who now facilitates Social Science Research Council writing retreats for MMUF dissertators and serves on the UNCF/Mellon Board of Advisors, Dr. Benjamin is an independent scholar who lives with her family in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Welcome to the SOREN LIT Podcast! Meet Host and Founding Editor, Melodie J. Rodgers. 

Get updates on all things SOREN LIT! 

www.sorenlit.com

Twitter: @LitSoren

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sorenlit

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sorenlit/