The Unending Hereafter with Crystal Simone Smith — National Poetry Month

Racial violence echoes heavily. Black communities are often re-traumatized in processes to seek justice for those killed unjustly. In this grief workshop, participates are invited to construct erasure poems that reflect the continuous police violence we face and the losses we are tasked to survive.

Crystal Simone Smith is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Routes Home, and Running Music. She is also the author of Wildflowers: Haiku, Senryu, and Haibun. Her work has appeared in numerous journals. She is an alumna of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Yale Summer Writers Conference. She holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Durham, NC with her husband and two sons where she teaches English Composition and Creative Writing. She is the Managing Editor of Backbone Press. Her latest book Dark Testament, released this January, gives voice to the mournful dead, their lives unjustly lost to violence, and to the grieving chorus of protestors in today's Black Lives Matter movement, in search of resilience and hope.

Grief, like good poetry, isn't linear. It's rarely straightforward, often confusing. It circles and lifts, eddies and fades, then comes back all the sudden to punch you in the gut when you least expect it. Sometimes it's furious, sometimes persistent, and sometimes even sweet.

Most of language fails us when it comes to grief, which is why we need a practice of reviving the basic tools we have to talk about what we've gone through, are still going through.

Poetry can be that practice: messy, personal, reaching, revelatory.

For National Poetry Month, Scalawag takes our grief and other loves on the road; We're hosting writing workshops with poets across the South to create spaces we can gather in community where we can struggle to find the words together.

Host or Publisher Scalawag