S9 Ep. 10: Maya Angelou Book Award Winner Alison C. Rollins on the Poetics of Sound, Space, and Image
2025 Maya Angelou Book Award winner Alison C. Rollins joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V. V. Ganeshananthan to discuss her 2024 poetry collection Black Bell. She explores the history and symbolism of a bell-laden iron device used to control and torture enslaved people and describes the replica she created after studying metalworking. She also recounts the story of Harriet Jacobs, who spent seven years hidden in her grandmother’s attic before escaping slavery. Rollins talks about how her poems engage in call and response with other texts, including the music of Sun Ra and Stevie Wonder and…
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