National Poetry Month @ The Betsy | Diamond Forde & Caridad Moro-Gronlier

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Diamond Forde is a Black poet and the author of The Book of Alice (Scribner, 2026), winner of the 2025 James Laughlin Award, and Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021), winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. The recipient of additional awards and fellowships from the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the College Language Association, Great River Review, Callaloo, and Tin House, she has served as a visiting poet for the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. Forde’s Book of Alice has been described by Scribner as ‘A powerful collection exploring the legacy of survival as seen through the life of a Black woman born in the Jim Crow South’. The Book of Alice won the Academy of American Poets' prestigious James Laughlin prize for a second book of poetry, for which the poet also received a week-long residency in The Betsy Writers Room at The Betsy Hotel in Miami Beach. Forde is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University and earned a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University.

Caridad Moro-Gronlier was born in Los Angeles to Cuban immigrant parents who relocated to Miami, Florida. She is the author of four books of poetry, including Through the Lens and As to Your Comment, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2026 and 2027, respectively; Tortillera (Texas Review Press, 2021), winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize; and Visionware (Finishing Line Press, 2009). She is also the editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers Respond to Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing (Beacon Press, 2020). Moro-Gronlier serves as the senior editor for SWWIM Every Day, an online daily poetry journal for women-identifying poets, is the outgoing Poet Laureate of Miami Dade County (2024-26) and serves as The Betsy Hotel’s Writers Room Poetry-Curator-at-Large. Widely recognized for her work in LGBTQ+ representation and community education, she was a 2025 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and holds a graduate degree in English literature from Florida International University.

WINNER OF THE 2025 JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD FROM THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS
A stunning new collection exploring lineage and the legacy of survival as seen through the life of the poet’s grandmother Alice—a Black woman born in the Jim Crow South—using the King James Bible as a narrative framework.
“Alice / a god-song, swings still in the high / branch of our throats. I miss her, wonder / what she plants in heaven’s mulch.”
When her grandmother died, poet Diamond Forde inherited a well-worn family Bible to remember her by. In The Book of Alice, she retells the story of her grandmother’s life through the framework of the only poetry Alice knew: the King James Bible. A Black woman born in the Jim Crow South, Alice joined the tide of the Great Migration when she made her exodus to New York City. She married, divorced, and raised eight children, all while struggling to define herself in an America that looks frighteningly like our own. Using found forms like recipes, a family tree, and a US Census Report alongside imagined psalms and scriptures, Diamond draws bold parallels between biblical narratives and the lived experiences of those often relegated to the margins of history. The result is both a heartfelt elegy and a new sacred text.

In Through the Lens, Caridad Moro-Gronlier redefines ekphrasis for a visually saturated world, expanding her poetic gaze beyond the image to include the objects, spaces, texts, and moments that shape our cultural and personal landscapes. These poems do more than describe—they interrogate, interpret, and reflect, treating each subject as a living, dynamic presence. Moro-Gronlier invites the reader to slow down, look again, and reconsider how meaning is made. This genre-defying collection dismantles the frame and reframes the familiar, challenging not only what we perceive, but the very structures that teach us how—and what—it means to see.

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