Geffrey Davis
Photo by Andrew Kilgore
Bio
Geffrey Davis is the author of Night Angler (BOA Editions, 2019), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Other honors include the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. His poems have been published by Crazyhorse, Mississippi Review, New England Review, New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Nimrod, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches with the University of Arkansas’s MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and with the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program. He also serves as poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.
In addition to providing the material support and necessary time for making art, this award places my voice alongside and after so many literary lights, calling me to contribute the next notes I have to offer an ongoing chorus of survival. This tremendous honor also affirms a spell of possibility that was stirring within the poor black boy who dared to pick up a pen and, in doing so, started becoming me many years back. Bless the boy then. Bless the boy now.
from “Self-Portrait as a Dead Black Boy”
I.
at thirteen for a whole dark season
I was lethal with my pellet gun murdering
small things that wandered into yard stalking
the thin woods between our house & the highway—
I picked off any bird squirrel rabbit snake
I could track if I had two surprised seconds
to explain the meaning of my hands my instincts
would have been to show you the weapon
to turn hoping you could see gentleness
poised behind the risk—: so when Tamir Rice
was shot X times: the toy pistol he carried
couldn’t have killed anything big or small
even if he’d tried:— but of course
as the story goes that math’s all wrong
II.
the law among my friends growing up:
whoever’s car had the best sound—assuming
they wasn’t in trouble with they mamma—drove
we rode the wheels off of TT’s grandma’s
burgundy hooptie because of how
the bass from its speakers trembled the tips
of our hair & slapped our young bodies alive
with a beat—: so when Jordan Davis
was shot X times: his legs & lungs
& aorta pierced—a citizen who hated
the rattle that black folks can make when
they make it out the house:— all around
America’s trespass music fell even now
a different mood than mine hits my ears like rain
(From Night Angler. Copyright © 2019 by Geffrey Davis. Used with the permission of BOA Editions, www.boaeditions.org)