Kiki Petrosino
Bio
Kiki Petrosino was born in Baltimore, Maryland. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Witch Wife (Sarabande, 2017), which was named among the New York Times’ “Best Poetry of 2017.” Her poetry and prose have appeared in Poetry, The Best American Experimental Writing, The Nation, Tin House, and online at Ploughshares. Her awards include research fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, Virginia Humanities, and the University of Louisville’s Commonwealth Center for Humanities and Society. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she directs the Creative Writing Program. She also teaches occasionally in the Brief Residency MFA Program at Spalding University.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about literacy. Who is empowered to read, write, and tell the story of America? This National Endowment for the Arts award will support my research process for the book I’ve set out to write, a book of poems about the legacy of slavery in the Upper South. I’m starting this project by tracing my own ancestors’ journeys to freedom, using the tools of genealogy and documentary poetics. This is difficult work, since my African-American forebears left few written records of their lives, a fact reflecting antebellum laws prohibiting black literacy in slaveholding states. As I have developed this project, the very fact of my own literacy—which I practice each day in my career as a black artist and teacher—has been my great mystery to unravel, a marvelous gift my ancestors passed down to me through generations of effort. With this award, I hope to live up to this incredible legacy. Every story has a beginning, and with the help of the NEA, I’m starting mine at the intersection of public and private history. It is at such crossroads that poetry begins.
"Contagion"
I wake up in my body & it’s worse
than a war zone. My smoke-cloud of blood
my hair grenade tick tick boom. It’s worse than
a war zone when I cruise past your brunch. Just
to get bread. Just ordering juice. I open my mouth
& the War rolls out, dense as a foghorn. I can’t
keep from squeezing my skull. I keep time-traveling
back to the noon of my birth. Worse than a war zone
that Sunday, that time, when I wept in the War
of myself. That’s the first war I knew. It was worse
than a war.