So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth

aracelis girmay is a poet, editor, and teacher. Her most recent poetry collection is the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016). Her essays and poems have been published, most recently, in The Paris Review, Astra, Black Renaissance Noire, and The New Yorker. Girmay is the Editor-at-Large of the Blessing the Boats Selections and is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. She is the editor of So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth. 

Dr. LeConté Dill was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, California. She is a scholar, educator, and a poet in and out of classroom and community spaces. Dr. Dill holds degrees from Spelman College, UCLA, and UC Berkeley, has participated in VONA Voices and Cave Canem writing workshops, and was a 2016 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop Fellow. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. She listens to and shows up for urban Black girls and other youth of color and works to rigorously document their experiences of safety, resilience, resistance, and wellness. Her work has been published in a diverse array of spaces, such as Poetry Magazine, Mom Egg Review, Journal of Poetry Therapy, the Du Bois Review, and The Feminist Wire.

Keeonna Harris is a storyteller, abolitionist, organizer, and mother-of-five.  She received her PhD in Justice Studies from Arizona State University, where her dissertation research analyzed the experiences of Black Women navigating motherhood and mass incarceration.  Her forthcoming memoir, Mainline Mama (Amistad, 2025), draws from her experiences as a Black woman, teen mother, and twenty years of raising children with an incarcerated partner while building community in the borderlands of the prison.  

Maya Marshall is the author of All the Blood Involved in Love. She is cofounder of underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. Marshall has taught at Emory University and Northwestern University. She holds fellowships from MacDowell, Cave Canem, Vermont Studio Center and elsewhere. Her writing has been published in Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She works as an editor at Haymarket Books and she is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Adelphi University.

Mendi Lewis Obadike makes literature, art, and music. Her publications include: Armor and Flesh (2004), and with Keith Obadike: Phonotype (2012), Four Electric Ghosts (2014), and Big House / Disclosure (2014). Mendi+Keith’s albums include: The Sour Thunder: An Internet Opera (2004), Crosstalk: American Speech Music (2008), and Big House / Disclosure (2014). With her partner, Keith Obadike, Mendi has made a series of large-scale sound art works, including: Blues Speaker (for James Baldwin) at The New School in New York, Free/Phase at the Chicago Cultural Center, Sonic Migration at Scribe Video Center and Tindley Temple in Philadelphia, Fit (the Battle of Jericho) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the 8 hour overnight work lull, a sleep temple.

Tiphanie Yanique is a novelist, poet, essayist and short story writer. Her most recent work is a novel and short story collection entitled Monster in the Middle, selections of which were published in The Harvard Review and The New Yorker. She is the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. Tiphanie is also the author of the novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. She is the author of a collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation's 5Under35. Her writing has won the Bocas Award for Caribbean Fiction, the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet's Prize. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands. She grew up in the Hospital Ground neighborhood in St. Thomas. She lives now with her family in Atlanta where she is a tenured associate professor at Emory University.

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