TRIO AWARD-WINNING POET
for...
Artress Bethany White
"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
“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Artress Bethany White’s second collection of poetry should be committed to memory and passed down as a living, poetic, historical document.”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
Photo credit: Christopher Descano
Artress Bethany White, Ph.D.
POET, ESSAYIST, & LITERARY CRITIC
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 is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. Her third poetry collection, Scottish Genes, African Tapestry, is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky in spring 2025 and chronicles her family's history of enslavement in America. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her poetry collection My Afmerica: poems (Trio House Press, 2019), selected by poet Sun Yung Shin. Her prose, Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity, received a 2022 Next Generation Finalist Indie Book Award. White is co-editor of the new anthology Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (Pangyrus, 2023), which writer Camille Dungy refers to as "a blessing and a balm." Recent work also appears in the anthology Why I Wrote This Poem: 62 Poets on Creativity and Craft (McFarland, 2023). She has received scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Tupelo Press MASS MoCA. She is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University.
Books available through Amazon, Trio House Press, and Bookshop
Contact: Artress dot White at gmail dot com
“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.”
"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