"In her second collection, My Afmerica, Artress Bethany White grapples with the grief of generations of Black mothers in America." Jeneva Stone for Green Mountains Review
Artress Bethany White's recent collection of poetry is both timely and timeless...[it] is a survival narrative that envelops the duality of the African American experience in the U.S. and the struggle for the American dream." Alley L. Biniarz for Harbor Review
Artress Bethany White received a 2022 Next Generation Finalist Indie Book Award for her debut essay collection Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity (New Rivers Press). She is also the recipient of the Trio Award for her poetry collection, My Afmerica (Trio House Press, 2019), and the author of the poetry collection Fast Fat Girls in Pink Hot Pants. Her prose, poetry, and book reviews have appeared in such anthologies and journals as How I Wrote This Poem: 62 Poets on Creativity and Craft (fall 2022), POETRY Magazine, Harvard Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Banyan Review, The Hopkins Review, Salamander, Pleiades, Tahoma Review, and Green Mountains Review. White has received fellowships and residencies at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Writer’s Hotel, and the Tupelo Press/MASS MoCA studios. She is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University and teaches poetry and nonfiction workshops for Rosemont College Summer Writer’s Retreat in Pennsylvania. She is also nonfiction editor at the Boston-based literary magazine Pangyrus.
Books available through Small Press Distribution, Amazon, New Rivers Press,Trio House Press, and Bookshop
Contact: Artress dot White at gmail dot com
Artress Bethany White
Artress Bethany White, Ph.D.
POET, ESSAYIST, & LITERARY CRITIC
“My Afmerica forces us to consider the cost of history, brutality, racism, accompanied by documented facts. In doing so, her work makes our bodies react with a nod, a jaw clench, a curse, a sigh, a held breath. White’s art is as evident as her keen use of form translates what the textbooks often miss. There is no overstating that My Afmerica is one of those books that should be studied as history, poetry, theory, and art. Artress Bethany White’s second collection of poetry should be committed to memory and passed down as a living, poetic, historical document.”
Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
“In verse both free and deftly formal, Artress Bethany White
unflinchingly mines the notion of family: biological, blended,
constructed and decidedly American. She takes no prisoners,
or perhaps takes us all prisoners, kicking into the necessary
and discomfiting discourse of who we truly are—and how
we are tied together in awful, and also surprisingly beautiful,
ways.”
Danielle Legros Georges, Poet Laureate, City of Boston
"A well-written, powerful examination of America’s racial legacies.”--Kirkus Reviews
“Talk about the right time to find a story… My copy arrived two months after Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed, three weeks after the first arrests for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, four days after the world watched George Floyd’s murder on video; in other words, right when the world finally seemed to wake up to the reality of race in America.”
--Mom Egg Review
An Official 2022 Author for LBF!
“Over the past decade, I have faced the
challenge of raising a transracial family in the
South, reckoned with being descended from
one of the largest slaveholding families in
America, and faced the history of a nineteenth-
century ancestor being lynched by the KKK.
As I worked to assess these realities, I
marveled at how my experiences were echoed
in the trauma of a nation under siege from
domestic terrorism, gun violence, and racism.
In the spirit of healing, I share Survivor’s
Guilt: Essays on Race and American
Identity with a public searching for answers
to America’s complex racial dilemma.”