t’ai freedom ford (she/her) is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The African American Review, Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Tin House, Obsidian, 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 and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. Winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, her first poetry collection, how to get over, is available from Red Hen Press. Her second poetry collection, & more black, is forthcoming Spring 2019 from Augury Books. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

Fellowship Statement

My writing grapples with all things related to my existence/non-existence in these United States. This means I'm obsessed with issues around (so-called) race (whiteness/ Blackness/otherness/mixedness), gender and sexuality (gender queering/querying, masculine-of-centering, closeted bisexual questioning), family/ancestral heritage (American/Black histories), pop culture (escapism via fantasy, public personas and invasion of privacy), and gentrification (desecration of sacred spaces, displacement, whiteness and entitlement, etc.) Currently, I'm working on a novel that explores how families and communities deal with grief and loss in the midst of gentrification. Also, I’m dreaming of ways to create multi-media works that amplify Black angst, Black joy and Black noise.