2025 Roanoke-Chowan Book Award for Poetry
A01=Crystal Simone Smith
African American haiku
Author_Crystal Simone Smith
Black nature poetics
Category=DC
Category=JBSL
Category=NHTB
ekphrastic tanka sequences
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
eq_society-politics
Ernestine Turner
Federal Writers' Project
folk history
Fredrick Douglass
Freedom on the Move database Cornell University
Frogpond journal
Haibun
North Carolina Literary and Historical Association
Roanoke-Chowan Award Winner
slave advertisements
slave narratives
Product details
- ISBN 9781478031819
- Weight: 159g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 16 May 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Crystal Simone Smith’s new poetry collection, Runagate, reimagines the experiences of enslaved and formerly enslaved persons in a stark and chilling response to the archives of chattel slavery: bills of sale, interviews, narratives, and fugitive runaway ads. Embodying the aesthetics and Japanese poetic forms haiku and tanka, her poems bear witness to the brutal and horrifying treatment of enslaved people and contrast their humanity with the inhumanity of their enslavers. In these poems, fugitive persons evade slave patrol hounds by climbing magnolia trees, use the cover of night and the detritus of a shipwreck to swim to freedom, and find temporary refuge in a cabin where a woman offers bread and water. Throughout, Smith poignantly envisions their flights to freedom-passages that were fueled by love, hope, and impossible dreams. She unceasingly gives voice to those who found courage in both bondage and freedom. In Runagate, the enslaved regain their stories and return to the sensory world.
Crystal Simone Smith is Instructor of the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University and author of Dark Testament: Blackout Poems.
