WF Aurielle Marie: We Will Do The New World A Favour And Tell The Truth.

What this episode covers

In this episode special guest co-host Zoe Flowers of the Magick Hourz podcast joins Risa to talk with theorist and poet Aurielle Marie. Aurielle Marie (she/her they/them)is a Black and queer poet, essayist, and cultural strategist from the South. Their debut collection, Gumbo Ya Ya (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Through their work as a poet and an activist, she explores the uses of intimacy and ritual in the practice of Black resistance. Aurielle is a 2018 Lambda Literary Writer Retreat fellow, a 2017 Roddenberry Fellowship Finalist, a Voices of Our Nation Fellow-Alum, a 2016 Kopkind Fellow, and a current Queer Emerging Artist-In-Residence at Destiny Art Center. She was chosen by Safiya Sinclair as the 2017 Poetry Prize Winner for Blue Mesa Review. She has been featured as a social-political pundit on CNN. Her essays and poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Adroit Journal, Blue Mesa Review, Selfish Magazine, in Scalawag, on For Harriett, ESSENCE Mag, Allure, NBC Blk, and Huffington Post. Her collection, Gumbo Ya Ya, won the 2017 Write Bloody Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured on a global host of stages, most prestigiously in her grandmother’s kitchen. "Marie’s command of music and images feels like true alchemy, and the collection is brimming with moments that brought me chills, none more so than her closing poem “in the event i become some unrecognizable beast,” where she tells us: i bring ritual in the creole of angels— my mother’s tongue. i bring with me, salt and what i’ve done with the mud. am i not an altar? […]" "A part of way-finding the new world is to embrace being on the run, being fugitive, being abolitionists, being in protest. ... Being in a practice of conjuring, it's just reminding me that this world is a fabricated thing too. ... I just keep pouring into this wild future."