#ObsidianVoices

Diamond Forde is the author of Mother Body, available with Saturnalia Books. She is a Callaloo and Tin House fellow whose work has appeared in Boston Review, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more. For more information, see her website www.diamondforde.com.

Kweku Abimbola is a post-graduate Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He is of Gambian, Ghanaian, and Sierra Leonean descent. He is a finalist for the 2021 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, the second-place winner of Furious Flower’s 2020 poetry contest, and has work published and forthcoming in Shade Literary Arts, 20.35 Africa, The Common, Obsidian, Sunu Journal, and elsewhere. Kweku is presently working on his first full-length poetry manuscript entitled “Saltwater Demands a Psalm,” where he investigates colonization, black mourning, black boyhood, gender politics, and the spiritual consequences of climate change in West Africa. His chapbook, Birth Elegies, is forthcoming in May 2022. You can find him on Twitter: @kwxkuu.

 Moderator

Lauren K. Alleyne is the award-winning author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (2014) and Honeyfish (2019), and is co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020). Alleyne was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, and currently lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where she is a professor of English at James Madison University, and the assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center.