African Voices Summer 2016 (Digital) | Page 7

Undressing In The Rain placed 3rd in Young Chicago Author’s Louder Than A Bomb University, a national individual college slam event. His work documents his journey through the world exploring concepts of social justice, Blackness, Latinidad, masculinity, love and the search for home. His first collection of poems On The Way Here, is available from 2Rise Press. Charles Reese received a B.A. Degree in Mass Communications & Theatre Arts from Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA. The multi-faceted thespian is a long standing member of SAG/ AFTRA and AEA (the professional film and stage unions). Reese has numerous performing credits in theatre, television, independent film, voiceovers and web series. Reese is the editor and original actor for the Off-Broadway playbook, James Baldwin: A Soul On Fire by the late playwright, Howard B. Simon. Zoe Smith-Holladay is a rising 7th grade creative writing major at the Denver School of the Arts. She is founder & author of kidsanimalstation.com, an animal blog that she started when she was eight. In Spring 2016, Smith-Holladay’s first fictional piece of prose “No Man’s Land” was published in literary magazine Calling Upon Calliope. Her favorite genres to read and write in are historical fiction, comedy, and fantasy. When she grows up, she wants to be a geneticist and would like to find a way to combine her passion for creative writing and science. Published on africanvoices.com Khalil Anthony Peebles is a polymath, a multi-disciplinary artist working within varying mediums and media. His work investigates the relationships between the spirit and space, the black body, sexuality, society, and the urban experience. Weaving together these artistic intentions through writing, dance and movement, acting, painting, arts-admin, education, and song, his work speaks to a diverse audience and varying communities. Jawanza Phoenix is a lawyer and the author of two books of poems, I Need an Assignment and The Intersection of Beauty and Crime. Nelly Rosario is author of Song of the Water Saints: A Novel (Pantheon, 2002), winner of a PEN/Open Book Award. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry appear in various anthologies and journals, including Callaloo, Meridians, Review, Chess Life, and el diario/La Prensa. Rosario holds an MFA from Columbia University and was formerly on faculty in the MFA Program at Texas State University. She was a recent Visiting Scholar at MIT, her alma mater, and presently serves as writer/researcher for the Blacks at MIT History Project. Rosario lives in Brooklyn, where she’s at work on a speculative novel on community medicine. Even though there are things I can’t let go of — your smile at high noon, or the way you would stare into my body, as though I housed a whole country there. & what’s a country in a body except a colony? & colonization can happen to a heart as well as a whole people. & people seem to overlook that love is not a freight truck that runs over the worst parts of us; it is a bird watcher, face stretched out towards heaven waiting to spot wings. & what do I know about heaven? The same thing I know about wings, I can’t have it. & so let me be a pilgrim, searching for forgetting your smile at high noon, which I already mentioned & which every passing day grows fainter. & this is the point: when love is gone dress yourself up in the things you can’t let go of, like armor or like blossoms. Dress yourself up so pretty that even the blind catcall the seams of your silhouette. Seams round & soft as pillows. The weather man says chance of rain & I leave home without my umbrella. This is living & loving & attempting to forget — when you stand in torrential rain during a cold spring & let a memory wash off like a silk dress — © 2016 Yesenia Montilla african Voices 7