12
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2018 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY GLENIS REDMOND
Sketch For Harriet E. Wilson With a determined hand, write the wrong. Right it! Press your free hand upon parchment. Spill ink like storm clouds that clot what your soul cannot hold. Catch what history hurls. Double your fist in defiance, unfurl your world into long lines. Get straight to the point: Pen every deed. Record the heavy dreams that woke you each morning. Press down. The paper can bear your weight. Make the page speak of back break, the quill quiver with nothing less than the meat of it. Whip the naked flesh of the past like you were slashed. Bleed deep – gash history, even if it must stand on hobbled legs. Draw the face, so we may stare at the rotten-teeth truth. Give yourself a pristine mouth to say your piece, a doorway
GLENIS REDMOND, a South Carolina native, travels nationally and internationally reading and teaching poetry so much that she has earned the title “Road Warrior Poet.” She is Poet-in-Residence at The Peace Center for the Performing Arts in Greenville, SC, and at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, NJ. In 2014-16, she served as the Mentor Poet for the National Student Poet’s Program to prepare students to read at the Library of Congress, the Department of Education, and for First Lady Michelle Obama at The White House. The poet is a Cave Canem Fellow, a North Carolina Literary Fellowship Recipient, and a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist. She also helped create the first Writerin-Residence at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, NC. Her poems have previously been selected as Applewhite finalists and then published in NCLR 2012 and 2014, and she had two more finalists in the 2018 competition, one of which was selected for third place. These poems and an interview with this poet will be published in the 2019 print issue.