brittny ray crowell in conversation with Dr. Georgene Montgomery

brittny ray crowell is an assistant professor of English at Clark Atlanta University, where she teaches courses in poetry and composition. She is a recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and the Lucy Terry Prince Prize. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

How can we memorialize our dead? How can that memorialization rend the veil between the dead and the living? In her debut volume, brittny ray crowell sifts through decades of obituaries, journals, and other ephemera to exhume the generations of her family from her hometown of Texarkana, Texas. She preserves her relatives’ stories in writing and in works of collage, a style of archive that layers the past and the present literally and poetically.

Georgene Bess Montgomery is a Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages at Clark Atlanta University. She received her B.A. and M.A. in English from Georgia Southern University and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland. An initiated priest of Shango, she is the author of The Spirit and the Word: A Theory of Spirituality in Africana Literary Criticism, which utilizes a method informed by the ideas and worldview of Ifa, an ancient African spiritual system, to unlock deeper levels of meaning in the writings of African peoples.

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