The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry | Ann Arbor District Library

Sherina Rodriguez Sharpe: Volume IV

1. Oranges

2. TETRA Ritual #24: This is Hungry Work

3. The Black Filipina Dictionary

4. Promised Land

Artist's Statement

Decolonizing is an incredibly intimate act. These poems move through self-definition and mirror work to find joy and liberation.

About the Artist

Named "Medicine Woman of Racial Healing" by the elders of her tradition, Sherina Rodriguez Sharpe has dedicated her life to using art and ancestral rituals to transform trauma into power.

A ritualist, writer, alter, and performance artist, Sherina is a master healer initiated in Black and Filipina spiritual technologies and empowered by her elders to create new technologies when needed.

She alchemizes art and ritual to guide freedom movements that dissolve oppression. By courageously facing down the past, she calls down outdated patterns, and opens a higher road of joy, mutual care, play, and deep community relationships. Sharpe is a two-time Kresge Fellow (2024 & 2014), Cave Canem Fellow, and VONA author. She directs The TETRA: Digital Underground Railroad, a secret liberation project with her partner, Chace Morris. Her healing methodologies are taught at Howard, Harvard, and Yale.

When she’s not in ritual, Sherina can be found cuddling her four chihuahuas and basking in her own blend of joy and mischief.

1. Shadow Man

2. Reopen The Economy

3. Hex As A Language

4. Truth About Blackbirds

Artist's Statement

I believe in the magic and spellwork and offense of the poem. Like, going on the offensive. And I think these poems, delivered in this order, comprise a long-form spell. Poems are often positioned as defensive--healing and holding, a response to, an interpretation and reclaiming of. But I think writers like June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Saul Williams write like swinging on a face sometimes, making the system put its hands up for once. Observing, reporting, emotionally excavating injustice, yes, but also being able to go on the offensive, hexing what harms and blessing what builds. And in this time, after this last election, with much on the line, I’m trying to write good magic and step-the-hell-back for my kinfolk.

Chace Morris

Writer/Performer/Educator/Detroiter

About the Poet

Chace Morris is a poet, emcee, & Afrofuturist out of Detroit. His work is in constellation with that of June Jordan, Kendrick Lamar, Nina Simone, & Saul Williams, blending Afro-futurism, Black myth, and music as rebel magic.

He is a two-time Kresge Arts Fellow (2024 Live Arts Fellow as The TETRA, 2013 Literary Fellow), a Radical Imagination Grant recipient, and recipient of an Alain Locke Award from the Detroit Institution of Arts.

Chace is also the co-founder of The Digital Underground Railroad, an arts & ritual project, alongside his partner Sherina Rodriguez Sharpe. Together, they are known as The TETRA.

When not writing, Chace is deep into movie-loving, laughing as a form of self-medication, and curating playlists that can save the day.

About the Cover Artist

Shannon Rae Daniels is a Cantonese American visual artist and writer whose recent work has explored questions of impermanence, goodness, and beauty as they relate to the self and to communities at large — particularly American Chinatowns, which she is deeply invested in as someone with strong roots in New York City’s Chinatown. In 2023, she was selected for the Emerging Artists Program hosted by The Guild of Artists and Artisans in Ann Arbor, Michigan and then was chosen by a jury to show and sell her work at the Ann Arbor Summer Art Fair. She has taught arts and humanities classes at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston Arts Academy. She was born and raised in New York City and currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

About the Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry

The Ann Arbor District Library, Fifth Avenue Studios, and 1473 are proud to present The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry. This series was created to celebrate and document the art of poetry in recorded form. Featuring poets from Ann Arbor, metro Detroit, and beyond, we hope that this series showcases and archives the incredible poetry scene here in Ann Arbor, metro Detroit, and beyond.

The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry is named after and dedicated to two of my high school teachers, Judi Coolidge and Tom Wagner (RIP) of Bay High School (Ohio), who encouraged in me, as well as thousands of their other students, a lifelong appreciation and open-minded love of the arts.

-Chien-An Yuan, 1473

Artist's Statement

"I have lived many lives, I often say, and that is true of all my work. My books, my poems, my prose, express aspects of my background, geographies, histories, cultures, religions, mythologies, cuisines, and are journeys in time and space. Drawing deeply from my life in India, my Bene Israel (Indian Jewish) roots, my experiences in the US, immigration and displacement, racism and colonialism, death and loss, Nature, birds and animals, each book focuses on different, and yet related themes, weaving complex tapestries with imagery and fragmented as well as linear narratives. In this audio collection, I read poems from several books to create a medley and offer a wider perspective on my life’s work. " - Zilka Joseph

About the Poet

Zilka Joseph's work is influenced by Indian and Western cultures and by her Bene Israel roots. She was awarded a Zell Fellowship (MFA program) and the Elsie Choy Lee Scholarship (Centre for the Education of Women) from the University of Michigan. She has received many award nominations, honors, participated in literary festivals and readings, and has been featured on several radio programs and online interviews. Her work has appeared in POETRY, Poetry Daily, The Writers’ Chronicle, Frontier Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, Asia Literary Review, Cha, Poetry at Sangam, Pratik, The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Review Americana, Gastronomica, and in anthologies such as Cheers To Muses: Contemporary Works by Asian American Women, Uncommon Core, RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music, Matwaala Anthology of Poets from South Asia (which she co-edited), 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium and The Kali Project. Her chapbooks, Lands I Live In and What Dread, were nominated for a PEN America Beyond Borders and a Pushcart award respectively. Sharp Blue Search of Flame, her book of poems published by Wayne State University Press was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book Award. Her third chapbook Sparrows and Dust won a Best Indie Book Award and has been nominated for a Pushcart. In Our Beautiful Bones, her next book was a Foreword INDIES Book Award finalist, and nominated for a Pushcart, A PEN, Griffin, and the National Book Award. Her new book, Sweet Malida: Memories of a Bene Israel Woman, about the history and legends of the Bene Israel Jews of India, food, culture, and childhood memories, was published by Mayapple Press, in February, 2024. An international edition of the book will be published by Pippa Rann Books and Penguin Random House in late 2024. (See Books page for reviews, interviews etc.)

She was born in Mumbai, lived in Kolkata, and now lives in Ann Arbor, USA. She teaches creative writing workshops, and is a freelance editor and manuscript advisor. She is dedicated to coaching, lifting up every writer she works with, and creating a unique community of writers/students wherever she lives and teaches.

About the Cover Artist

Shannon Rae Daniels is a Cantonese American visual artist and writer whose recent work has explored questions of impermanence, goodness, and beauty as they relate to the self and to communities at large — particularly American Chinatowns, which she is deeply invested in as someone with strong roots in New York City’s Chinatown. In 2023, she was selected for the Emerging Artists Program hosted by The Guild of Artists and Artisans in Ann Arbor, Michigan and then was chosen by a jury to show and sell her work at the Ann Arbor Summer Art Fair. She has taught arts and humanities classes at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston Arts Academy. She was born and raised in New York City and currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Artist's Statement:

Poetry is prayer and perhaps that is how I stumbled on the art of reading and writing them. These words I hope are meditations on what becomes of grief over time, space, and memory. It encourages us to seek where does love begin and grief end? This is a small collection that is part of a larger collection in the works.

About the artist:

Kyunghee Kim is a public school educator turned poet and artist. She is a proud Korean American immigrant, creative writing teacher, coach for multi-passionate writers, wellbeing expert, and a speaker whose work focuses on exploring themes of loving and living in the complexities of loss. Her essays have appeared in HuffPost, Shondaland, and others. Kyunghee has created and taught workshops at GrieveWell, a local nonprofit in Ann Arbor, and collaborated with artists on various poetry readings, concerts, and art exhibitions. She is a believer in building community through art.

Her first book, See Us Bloom, is a children’s poetry book and is out now. When not writing, you can find Kyunghee on a hike somewhere, eating Korean food, watching K-Drama, or doing yoga (also a certified yogi).

She was born in South Korea, raised in a small town of Utica, Michigan, now lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan with her husband and sweet pup Rosemary. Her favorite title is being an emo (aunt).