April Gibson presents The Span of a Small Forever with Erin Sharkey

With echoes of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman’s journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving, taking, and sacrifice.

With breathtaking lyricism and a vulnerability that pierces the heart, April Gibson journeys through the emotional abysses, the daily pleasures, the frustrations, and the joys of being a Black woman living with chronic illness.

Gibson offers a unique perspective on “the body,” viewing disability and healthcare through both feminist and socio-economic lenses filtered by race and faith. Through gorgeous sensory language that migrates memories, from carefree innocence to the ravages formed in its absence, Gibson bears witness to grief, courage, and resistance to redefine herself on her own terms.

Gibson presents her body as a “looking glass” that re-envisions illness, womanhood, motherhood, religious relics and collective loss through her physicality, through her lamenting, through her unearthing, reckoning and rebirth. Not only do we see her, but see the “we” in her. The Span of a Small Forever is both testimony and transformation—heart-shattering in its honesty, it ultimately offers us transcendent beauty, nourishment, and the strength we need to go on in our lives.

April Gibson is a poet, writer, professor and author of the chapbook Automation. Her poetry has been published in multiple journals and magazines, including The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner. Gibson is a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, a Vermont Studio Center Residency, and has been a Writer-in-Residence for Write On, Door County. She is a fellow of The Loft Literary Center Mentor Series in Poetry, The Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and The Watering Hole Poetry Retreat, and has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities among other achievements. Gibson is a tenure-track faculty member in English at Malcolm X College (City Colleges of Chicago). She is a native and current resident of the South Side of Chicago.

Erin Sharkey is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the editor of A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars (Milkweed Editions ’23). Erin is a founding coop member of the Fields at Rootsprings, a retreat and respite space in central MN, and co-founder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt. She is the producer of film projects, including Small Business Revolution, which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Sharkey has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, Penumbra Theatre, Bell Museum of Natural History, Black Visions, Headwaters Foundation for Justice, and the Jerome Foundation. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and teaches with the Minnesota Pr*son Writing Workshop. Look for her as the Revisionary as part of the Loft Literary Center's Lit! Commons.

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