t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, RHINO, Vinyl, Muzzle, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. In 2012 and 2013, she completed two multi-city tours as a part of a queer women of color literary salon, The Revival, which was the basis of a full length documentary by the same name. Winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, her first poetry collection, how to get over is available from Red Hen Press. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn, where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

More info: www.howtogetover.com

This novel centers around death and black bodies. It is about the ways in which folk grieve and love and live after a loved one is no longer physically present. The novel aspires to remind readers that before the dead were victims, they were brothers and fathers, mothers and mentors, uncles and sisters.  And so, the novel is the author's attempt to negotiate the ways family and community heal. To consider the ways death shatters and shapes the folks left to make do with memory and makeshift memorials, absolution and absence, life and love.

t'ai was in residence at the Camargo Foundation from July 27 to August 27, 2018 in partnership with Art Matters and the Jerome Foundation.