Poetry Night with Okwudili Nebeolisa and Allisa Cherry

Nebeolisa's poems highlight how the poet and his family shoulder the responsibility of caregiving together and how Nebeolisa works to bridge the physical, and at times, emotional, distance between them. He wonders: I don't understand / her smile or why she would be submerged / in pain and wouldn't want to admit it. / Who did this to our mothers? The book questions his Nigerian mother's need to act brave and a son's need to protect.

Terminal Maladies reminds us that grief is inevitable, yet unique to each of us, and serves as a tribute to Nebeolisa's mother and is a necessary read for anyone who has faced the challenges of caring for a loved one.

Okwudili Nebeolisa is the author of Terminal Maladies, (Autumn House Press, 2024), selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Prize. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was a Provost Fellow and won the Prairie Lights John Leggett Prize for Fiction. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Image, The New England Review, POETRY, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and Threepenny Review. His fiction has appeared in Evergreen Review, while his nonfiction has been published in Catapult and Commonwealth Writers. He is an MFA student in fiction at the University of Minnesota where he is the recipient of a Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry. He is a recipient of support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Granum Foundation, and the Center for the Art Crested Butte. He is currently a poetry editor at Post Road Magazine.

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An Exodus of Sparks explores how violence reshapes family, geography, and faith. Predominantly set in the high desert, these poems explore the micro-losses of a father and brother (to downwinder-related cancer and substance abuse) against the macro-losses of a geography to nuclear testing and a tradition of faith to the ravages of grief. Liberally appropriating Judaic symbolism and wedding it to an inherited Mormon vocabulary and iconography, the poet/speaker wrests her power from her culture's sacred texts to revise her position in sight of patriarchal systems.

This collection is for anyone exploring how loss reshapes identity. The book is structured around a crown of sonnets in which the speaker assumes the story of Moses and resituates it in the American Southwest. The book itself is an elegy composed of several smaller elegies; a fallible history; and most of all, a love letter to the family, culture, and geography that shaped the poet and her work.

Allisa Cherry is the author of the poetry collection An Exodus of Sparks (Michigan State University Press), shortlisted for the Lexi Rudnitsky first book prize and recipient of the 2024 Wheelbarrow Books poetry prize (RCAH Center for Poetry). Her work has appeared in journals such as The McNeese Review, TriQuarterly, and The Penn Review. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to a life in the U.S. and serves as a poetry editor for West Trade Review.

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