Thursday, March 31, 2016

Split This Rock Interview with Jan Beatty

by M. F. Simone Roberts


This conversation is one in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, 2016.


Pre-registration will close today, Thursday, March 31, at midnight at Split This Rock's website. Please, register now.


Jan Beatty’s fourth book, The Switching/Yard, was named by Library Journal as one of ...30 New Books That Will Help You Rediscover Poetry. The Huffington Post called her one of ten “advanced women poets for required reading.”  Her new book, Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, will be published in Spring, 2017 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Other books include Red Sugar (2008, Finalist, Paterson Prize), Boneshaker (2002), and Mad River (1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize). Limited edition chapbooks include Ravage, published by Lefty Blondie Press in 2012, and Ravenous, winner of the 1995 State Street Prize. Beatty hosts and produces Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WESA-FM featuring national writers. She worked as a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, in maximum security prisons, and as a waitress for fifteen years. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, and awards include the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, two PCA fellowships, and the $15,000 Creative Achievement Award from the Heinz Foundation. Beatty has read her work widely, at venues such as the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival, Split This Rock, and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University and the Madwomen in the Attic Workshops, where she teaches in the MFA program.

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Simone Roberts (MFSR): Let’s start by getting one subject out of the way. In your interviews, it’s clear that you’re surprised that readers or critics are surprised/outraged that one of your major themes is violence and everyday brutality enacted on women. I’m surprised, too. Their tone simpers as if they’ve just never read such hard and bruising imagery before, as if you are doing something unfair to them. It’s clear there’s a patriarchal taboo here. Their problem seems to be that when men’s poetry glorifies the brutality they inflict on each other it’s heroism, and your poetry is guilty of messing with that heroic masculine. As if violence is only heroic, instead of mostly just venal and selfish and ego-serving, and inflicted on intimates. I’m sure you’re a little tired of talking about the “scandal” of your realism. Instead, I want to ask you this: how would you like to see people (poets, teachers, readers) using poetry to connect intimate safety with social justice for women?


Jan Beatty (JB): Well, messing with the “heroic masculine” is still apparently a cultural crime. In answer to your question, I always want to return to the power of one voice. A woman speaking what is true for her can make a door where there is no door—that’s the power that I trust, that I live inside of. I don’t have a plan or desire for how I’d like to see people use “…poetry to connect intimate safety with social justice for women.” As long as women continue to write what is unspeakable to them, to write the brutality that happens to them—what they know in their bodies to be real and relentless, and totally unacceptable—then those voices will rise to help other women. As you know, this violence against women is deep, it happens every day all day—and yet, when women speak of it, there is tremendous resistance. We need to write the resistance and read the tough poems at readings—you never know who is listening, who needs to hear that she is not alone.


I have the privilege of directing the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, a program for women writers ages 18-94. Our entire reason for existence is to sandblast the invisibility of women writers. Part of our mission statement is that we “…value women’s work as writers, dreamers, and architects of society.” There are women who first joined Madwomen, saying: “I couldn’t write until my husband died. I was too afraid.” We have young women who are afraid to use the pronoun “I” in a poem, because some male teacher told them that it was self-involved. Talk to any woman, go to any writing class, and you’ll find stories that need to be told, but have been suppressed by violence against women—physical, emotional, psychic—whether in the world at large, in the academy, or by the white male poetry mafia. So, my suggestion is always to go to the power of the singular female voice in speaking and writing.


MFSR: “Three Faces and All These Fallen Gods” has a lot going on: The Missing Father, transgressive sex, and child’s longing. But, the interesting theme to me, the deeper register in the poem is about the world, or men, just not being *enough* -- real enough, intense enough, seductive enough for some kinds of personalities.


Younger, I spent many years wishing men
would say something hotter than I could think of--they never did.


Because really, I want to be relieved of making it all up--
let them run it hard and right for a change.


For me, this theme marks a lot of your work -- missing the mark. So, in the other direction: What satisfies in this time? This might be a question about poetry, or poetics, but it might be about the world in which we make them.


JB:  I guess the idea of missing the mark feels like an understatement. For me, it’s more like the great morass between how things are and how things need to be in terms of social justice. I’m obsessive and driven—and don’t think in terms of satisfaction that much, but in terms of striving, aiming towards a deepening in my own work. What that usually means for me is complication. How can I complicate the question or subject so that I can get to the heart of it? How can I strip off the easy, down to the metal inside us? What comes after our radiant failures?


MFSR: While we’re on brighter thoughts, I wonder, what’s the poem keeping you company these days? What’s the poem you’re rolling over in your mind?


JB: As part of the Madwomen Reading Series, we just hosted the amazing writer Diane Glancy. Her new book, Report to the Department of the Interior is filled with stunning poems of land and body—poems about the forced “education” of Native American children in boarding schools. There’s a poem, “Those Old Voices Are Always With Me,” that is just transforming—but you have to buy the book.
MFSR: Another major theme for you is the lost family, your search for your birth parents, all the biological and biographical holes in your personal narrative, even the everyone-and-no oneness of your biological father. As a reader, it makes me feel protective of you when I read these passages. Not that you want that, and not that your position is all that unique, but you are one of the very few women who write about it. We could take “Ghostdaddys” for an example.


My reach was endless, I was
birthed in a meteor shower and
all the stars knew my name.


……...


My face the face no/
father, unrecognizable/so why not?
I was the ultimate cum-shot,
I was the wildly surviving thing,
racing after ghostdaddys in dreams
Dear father, whoever you are,


I hope the sex was ravenous,
with cross/checking, slashing/
I hope there were slats of light everywhere
to see my star on the other side.


Abstracting this a whole bunch though, do you feel that this fact of your life puts you in a poetically or politically useful relation to the social currents of our era? Questions about location, belonging, identity, really realness -- they seem to be sticking around our culture, and for you are shaped by your being a daughter rather than a son.


JB: Thanks for asking about this. I do think my position is unique in that I’m not only writing about location, belonging, identity—but writing about it through the lens of adoption. Many people will say, “I had a terrible mother, or my mother died, or I was raised by my aunt,” etc. etc. Although I’m sorry for their situation—not knowing who you are, where you came from—is a very different trauma. I spent my first year in Roselia Asylum and Maternity Hospital in the Hill District in Pittsburgh, PA, and didn’t know my real name until I was in my late thirties. Walking around the world not knowing is an extreme dislocation. The culture then steals your name and history and wants you to be grateful for it. That’s where I first learned brutality and the need for truth. So, yes, I think that I’m in a position to write the “real” body in a politically necessary way.


MFSR: You write often about the hole of “no dad” and the hole of “mother’s anger” that mark many of us. Parents check out in so many ways. And that’s usually the first of many dings and cuts. Then the world comes for (many of) us. One very human response to that is to beat the life out of ourselves. Booze and drugs are two easy ways we do this, there are others. It’s going to feel like whiplash to ask it this way, but Starhawk’s new novel is about how we who are damaged in this world might fare when we (always have to) build the next world. It got me thinking, and I wonder how you take the idea: what to do with our damage in and as we make that other community?


JB: Although it sounds dramatic, I really don’t think I’d be here, that I would have survived, without poetry. As a young child, writing gave me a world to live in, a place to escape to. Years of bad poems and locked journals under my bed. I know that many writers have this experience. But, although poetry can bring release and bring speech to the page, I don’t believe in poetry as therapy. What to do with our damage—I would say that we each need to do the individual work needed to heal ourselves. I’ve been in therapy for many years. The healthier I become, the more I can bring to a community of writers or students. But, of course, everyone needs to do what they want to do. All of the damage that we carry has great capacity to help others—it could be through writing, speaking, or just walking around as ourselves. The poet Maggie Anderson used to say that she pictures an older woman somewhere who needs to hear what she has to say. This helps her to write. You never know who is getting something from what you say or write. I know that I couldn’t write some of my tougher poems without the women writers who came before me, and who are writing today. When I am afraid to put something on the page, I think of Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Gwendolyn Brooks—how did they write their brave poems at a time when women’s writing was barely being published? I hope that I can contribute to that community of writers.


MFSR: The feminine voice in your poems isn’t afraid of her power. “Tomorrow in the open I will be legion-- / you will see me bleeding from every pore, / a woman in the switching/yard,” she says, coming into the land of her birth father’s people, the voice of that connection coming on cosmic. This is also a speaker who would, if she could, shoot her no-good boyfriend. I like her, identify with her on lots of levels. Not because she’s edgy, but because she’s in herself, and that doesn’t mean her life is neat and tidy. She may not be you, but she’s related to the poet who puts “Switching”  -- “she became her own father” -- right next to “Dear American Poetry,” and doesn’t wink. The two make a triptych with “Stein: Letter to a Young Rilke,” advising the mystic to earth it up a bit. The place your poems live in Switching/Yard seems to be that place Virginia Woolf was describing when she talked about writers and “bisexual” minds (her usage, not mine). What you’re describing here is a kind of gender fluidity we don’t explore all that often, one that naturally and consciously and deliberately takes on the symbolism and textures of traditional masculinity. What’s your thinking about gender spectra, and switching, and the place of not-apologizing for inhabiting a whole self?


JB: Well, yes, I don’t want to be confined to one kind of voice or gender or one kind of gender, etc. I wouldn’t call the voice in my poems a “feminine” voice, but a woman’s voice. A woman who switches, yes—sometimes speaking as a man, a father. Sometimes speaking in a more fluid way, across a range of voice. I don’t know why someone would apologize for inhabiting a whole self, since that’s what we are. I don’t mean to imply that any of this comes easily. The problem seems to come in saying we are this or that----since that rules out other this or that’s. I think that this switching is common and explored a lot—but I would like to see a lot more acceptance of fluidity, since that would give us all room to breathe. I’ve never been a fan of categories. If I step in one, I’ve got one foot out the door, which is the way I like it.


MFSR: And that question, has something to do with poetry and publishing. In the small world of literary criticism or theory, we go around and around about how and if people are shaped by official or sanctioned culture, when that culture is made by (a small group of people), and how or if that culture is a machine for discipline, for lopping off parts of the psyche, the body, our ability to be fully. Split This Rock was delighted to publish “Dear American Poetry” as a Poem of the Week because we know in very great depth that American poetry is vibrating now with voices that put paid to the myths of that official culture, including its ideas about what poems are and why. What’s been the most promising trend or even insurrection that you’ve noticed over the last ten years or so?


JB: Yes, thank you for publishing “Dear American Poetry”—I thought it was brave of you. Well, I would say that Cave Canem has really changed American poetry in a much-needed way, supporting the work of African American poets. Also, the terrific journal, Bloom, published by Charles Flowers, has brought more visibility to the voices of queer writers. And Split This Rock has become such a great, energized movement for poetry as political action and diversity.


MFSR: One thing I really admire in your poetic is your insistence that the poem take the shape and form, or lack of it, that its subject and tone require. Better to stretch form than to silence a truth seems to be your way. Poems come fragmented, poems come linear, they’re full or bare of metaphor, like the range in Red Sugar. And you let some of your poems talk about themselves in ways that could be annoyingly ironic and “meta” and are instead admissions that you’re borrowing and running with it, as in Switching/Yard. How does that set of choices work for you? How much “listening” to your poems do you need to do to see their form?


JB: I’ve always tried to focus on writing the poem. What I mean is that I actively fight against any idea of project or plan or received form. Partially because I hate the idea of a project or guidelines that would limit or constrain what I would write about—but also, because I’m a big fan of organic form. I like what Levertov said about working intuitively: “… content and form are in a state of dynamic interaction; the understanding of whether an experience is a linear sequence or a constellation raying out from and into a central focus or axis, for instance, is discoverable only in the work, not before it.”


I’ve always been a fan of “finding the poem in my body,” as in working intuitively, combined with research, experience to be open to the poem forming. I’m a slow writer, and I believe in letting poems sit and develop. After usually many, many revisions over time, I’ll come to the poem. When I finished the manuscript for my first book, Mad River, I thought I had a problem because it had taken me ten years to write the book. There was a variation of tone and form that I thought was a weakness, but my editor at the University of Pittsburgh Press, Ed Ochester, told me that this variation was a strength of the book. I was happy to hear this, since I need a lot of room in my life and in my work—and I balk at the fixed idea of narrative arc, what seems to me to be a restrictive, conservative structure.


MFSR: What’s next for you? What are you imagining and working on now?  


JB:  I have a book coming out in Spring, 2017—Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press. I also have a lyrical nonfiction book on adoption called American Bastard that I’m hoping to get published soon. I’m looking for a publisher, so if anyone has a lead, let me know. Other than that, I’ve got some new poems that seem to have to do with women bodies and maps.  


Thanks, Simone, for the interview and all the time spent on this. Best of luck with your work.


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Beatty notes her press on her website: janbeatty.com. For this interview, I was inspired by these:
MF Simone Roberts Pic.jpg

M. F. Simone Roberts is the Poetry & Social Justice Fellow for Split This Rock. Roberts is an independent scholar of poetics and feminist phenomenology, a poet, editor, and activist. She is co-editor of the anthology Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays and author of the critical monograph A Poetics of Being-Two: Irigaray's Ethics and Post-Symbolist Poetics. Her poems are coming soon to a journal near you. Descendant of both aristocrats and serfs, she adventures this world with her consort, Adam Silverman.

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

#SplitThisRock2016 Sessions: Trauma, Violence, and Healing

We are pleased to present a selection of sessions on themes of trauma, violence, and healing at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016: Poems of Provocation & Witness.


For the full festival program, please visit the program page here.And hey: Pre-registration is open now until March 31

Restorative Poetics
Photo by Kristin Adair.
Samiya Bashir
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 101 [Map]

Friday, April 15 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Humanity on trial in digital space. Inexhaustible violence of -ism and image. We’ll consider the power of poem-making to metabolize aggression out of our bodies, to reclaim and restore humanity, and more. We’ll explore an alchemical poem-making toward transmutation of experience, insight, and approach--collaboratively and individually--toward resolution of swarming aggressions into light, into recognition, into direction, into sustenance. We’ll come with all we carry. We’ll leave with new poems, new maps, new seeds.



In This Skin: A Writing and Performance Workshop
Aimee Suzara

Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Gallery [Map]
Saturday, April 16 9:30am – 11:00am

"Every organ has a consciousness," wrote Akira Kesai. And Sekou Sundiata said, so aptly, "it all depends on the skin we're livin' in." The body is our nexus of joy and pleasure, as well as the nexus for historical trauma, erasure, and exploitation. This writing and performance workshop will allow participants to explore how to begin writing from the body, while addressing attitudes about the body, including perceptions and expressions of beauty, race, gender, sexuality, and ability/disability. Participants will explore and develop gesture and text through guided writing, theater, and movement exercises and create a short piece. Given recent events in which the destruction of Black bodies has been most visible, and the historical trauma experienced by many people of color, those of colonized histories, and women, the workshop has special timeliness and relevance. It is a part of an effort to remember, heal, and transform individually and collectively.


Trauma Narrative: Writing As A Way of Healing
Liz Alexander
Human Rights Campaign Room 105 C [Map]
Saturday, April 16 9:30am – 11:00am

This workshop will examine how writing, as a medium, can be used as a coping strategy and self soothing technique for persons who have experienced psychological and emotional trauma.
In this context, trauma is a term used to describe experiences or situations that are emotionally painful and distressing, overwhelming one’s ability to cope, invoking feelings of powerlessness, and impeding the normal functioning of one’s life. Through the use of exercises, the workshop explores how writing can serve as an outlet of expression, as a meditative practice, can be a space of safety and validation, and is a tool for processing and reinterpreting traumatic experiences. I also highlight several different modalities of writing, i.e music, spoken word, journalism, and memoir. The trauma narrative, or the “act of telling a story,” is an effective therapeutic technique for survivors of trauma and this interactive workshop serves as an overview of that process.


Won’t You Come Celebrate: A Meditation on Violence(s) in Poetry
Fatimah Asghar, Franny Choi, Nate Marshall, Aaron Samuels, Danez Smith, Jamila Woods
Human Rights Campaign Equality Forum [Map]
Saturday, April 16 2:00pm – 3:00pm

Photo by Kristin Adair
Borrowing its name from the iconic Lucille Clifton poem, this panel will bring together poets to discuss how they deal with the portrayal and exploration of violence in their work. Urban violence, sexual violence, genocide, and other forms of traumatic conflict will be explored as source material and inspiration for poetry. The poets will present how these conflicts figure into their work and influence both content and form. As artists, educators, and young poets of color, the members of the Dark Noise Collective will engage with questions of ownership, resistance, healing, and the white gaze.

Split This Rock Interview with Dominique Christina

by Elizabeth Acevedo


This conversation is one in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, 2016.


Pre-registration for the festival will close tomorrow, Thursday, March 31, at midnight at Split This Rock's website. Please, register now if you plan to join us.


Photo of Dominique Christina wearing metal necklace and black shirt

Dominique Christina. Mother. Teacher. Writer. TEDX Speaker. Licensed educator. Unapologetically large. Dominique entered the world of slam (competitive) poetry in 2011 and won the National Poetry Slam Competition that year. In 2012, Dominique won the Women of the World Poetry Slam Championship. In 2014 she won the Women of the World Poetry Slam Championship again, the only person to win that honor twice. She performed her tribute poem for Emmett Till in Washington D.C. for an inaugural event celebrating the anniversary of the March on Washington, for Emmett Till's and Trayvon Martin's families. Her work was featured on TV ONE's broadcasted show Verses and Flow. Her first full length book of poetry The Bones, The Breaking, The Balm was published by Penmanship Books in NY. Her book This is Woman's Work  appeared from Sounds True Publishing in 2015. Her work can be found in various anthologies and literary journals including Heart and Soul Magazine, The Dead Animal Handbook Anthology, Tandem, The Independent, Hysteria, and others. She is presently working on a Young Adult novel for Random House/Knopf. Learn more at Dominique Christina’s website.

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Elizabeth Acevedo (EA): Sometimes in the literary world, there is a dichotomy created by “othering” how work depending on how it is presented. I’m thinking here of  how poets who perform see this binary created as “page” vs “stage”. As someone who has not only been the reigning champion in almost every major national poetry slam event, but who has also received nods from Publisher’s Weekly for the work you’ve published, how do you navigate these binaries? Do you consider them imaginary? What tools do you deploy to work around or within them?


Dominique Christian (DC): I don't feel like I am navigating any binary whatsoever between page and stage. That has always felt like mythology to me. I was a little girl listening to my mama and grandparents walk around the house reciting canonical authors like T.S. Eliot and Edgar Allan Poe and while much of the language was more mature than I and escaped my understanding, what was not lost to me was how delicious and possible language is...and how available it is to all of us. My family of origin taught me that anything, anything at all can be "performed" and felt by folk in the room. I never wanted to get into slam (competitive poetry) in the first place. I thought I would live and die in a very "Dickinsian" way. I thought I would be an old woman dead in bed and my grandchildren would discover a crate full of poetry and be aghast to learn that I was a poet all that time. I had no desire to perform. Poetry and how I was engaging it almost felt like a secret; a holding place for all my ghosts. When I did relent and try slam for the first time (in 2011) I was deliberate about not bending to slam in any way. I wanted my voice to remain itself. Hell, I was never even able to honor the three minute time limit. But what I was performing in these competitions were pages from my diary, unsent letters to a dead stepfather, curses, etc. I was always surprised when I won. No. No binary for me between page and stage. At least not one I am willing to concede to. 

EA:  I definitely see how you resist the typical, simplistic categorization in your body of work. Time and again your embrace fluidity between genres and form.  I’m thinking particular to how your third book, “This Woman’s Work” seems like a departure from the form used in your previous two books; it’s a book that fuses myth, and poetry, and prose, and the lyric essay and yet offers very tangible advice. I am moved by how you continuously use every platform and genre available to you to tell your story: performance and publishing, poetry and prose...I even read somewhere you’re working on a Young Adult Novel. What is it that these different forms or genres offer you? Do you consider yourself primarily working within one platform? What is the process of creating a project that takes on many shapes as you’re writing it?

DC: I love language. I love writing and the radical nature of it. The honesty and truth telling it affords the individual. And there are many ways to be relative to language to communicate an idea or tell a story or hide a body, or unearth one. I love creative nonfiction. I love poetry. I love playwriting. I love stretching my own capacity. "This is Woman's Work" was written in 10 days. I'm obsessive like that. Once an idea latches on I have to lean into it forsaking most everything else until it is done. There were things about that book that I was afraid of; stories I was loathe to tell but I knew if I hung around with the idea too long I would never actualize it. I can always talk myself out of something particularly if the thing itself will expose some shit I am not ready to see about myself. The children's book is written lyrically so its not a sharp departure for me and the main character is a young girl and not only was I once that I am also raising that. Listening to my daughter and her friends provided a lot of the nuance necessary to capture the narrator's voice. In terms of process I am not sure how to language that except to say, I finish what I start, I never second guess the writing, I trust the process and believe entirely that my consciousness is working on my behalf and if I get out of the way enough there is an ancestral logic that takes over for me. 


EA: You are one of the most commanding performers I’ve ever witnessed, and you speaks on very controversial topics. You’re definitely socially engaged and unbending in getting your points across. As a poet who tours professionally, doing full shows for different audiences all over the country, and given our current climate of political and racial and LBGTQ tension, are you ever afraid of how your performance will be read?


DC: No. I ain’t afraid of shit. I don't think about that at all. I never worry about how or whether my performance will be received. Never. I didn't worry about it when I was slamming either. That probably sounds egotistical but it's not a statement borne out of ego. It is a statement borne out of a whole lot of soul work and grappling. I chased my ghosts down a long time ago. Nobody can hurt me with my story. It's mine. If they don't feel me they don't feel me. Fortunately I don't really have that experience. There are always people in the room wanting permission to grieve or rage or say amen. I bleed out loud and in doing so I think it gives other people permission to do the same. 


EA: I love that you feel no fear when it comes to occupying space a black queer woman. I think that fearlessness is shown in your work, in how you take risks with both content and craft, as well as performance.  Are there any rituals you partake in to help prepare yourself for certain audiences, things that help you remain unafraid?


DC: I am a black girl. I interrupt space everywhere I go. Been doing that all my life. When I was young I felt apologetic about it. Tried to shape shift. Get smaller; appear to be normal, ordinary. It only produced depression and suicidal ideation. I don't commit those crimes against myself anymore. I'm good with all of my moving parts. I am aware of, and pay attention to the eco-systems that are challenged by me showing up as myself. And when that is apparent to me I usually turn the volume way up. I'm in possession of my body. I ain't afraid of it. I don't loathe it. I don't apologize for it. The only ritual I practice to ready myself for rooms that may not know what to do with all of who I am, is to remember that I could have died a thousand times but didn't. So many other people did...and do. The least I can do is be in the full utility of my personhood. Least I can do is live out loud. I'm surrounded by people who see me and love me. That is more than enough worship and assurance right there. I don't mind putting my head in the lion's mouth from time to time. 


EA: I love it! I know that after this interview, and certainly after people hear you read at the festival folks will want to know where to look for your next project. So give us the inside scoop, what are you working on now? What should we look forward to from the indomitable Dominique Christina?  


DC: Finished a third volume of poetry that walloped me emotionally but I think it's one of the best things I have ever written. Finished the Young Adult Novel tentatively called Blood Misbehaves: The Period Chronicles of Mattie Metisse. And I'm in the beginning stages of curating an ambitious project for the fall called the Ruin Woman Exhibit that will involve live performance art, mixed media, blood, nudity...a moving museum of sorts. It will be one of the scariest things I have ever done, as an artist or a human being. I can't wait. 

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Elizabeth Acevedo is the Assistant Youth Programs Coordinator and head coach of Split This Rock's DC Youth Slam Team. She was born and raised in New York City and her poetry is infused with her Dominican parents’ bolero and her beloved city’s tough grit. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University as well as an MFA from University of Maryland. With over twelve years of performance experience, Acevedo has been a featured performer on BET and Mun2, as well as delivered a TED Talk that aired in March of 2013. She has graced stages nationally and internationally including renowned venues such as The Lincoln Center, Madison Square Garden, and the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts. Acevedo is the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam representative for Washington DC and placed in the top twenty-five in the overall competition. She holds the distinction of being the 2014 Beltway Grand Slam Champion, and as of August, she is a National Poetry Slam Champion. She lives in Washington D.C. and has been published or has poems forthcoming in The Acentos Review, The Ostrich Review, Split this Rock, Callaloo, Poet Lore, and The Notre Dame Review.