We are happy to announce that Rebecca Dietrich has been awarded the Fellowship for the proposed anthology, The Earth Still Whispers Her Name: Poems for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. The anthology will gather the voices of Indigenous poets across Turtle Island to speak to this crisis and its reverberations through grief, resistance, cultural memory, and survivance. While the central theme will be MMIW, the anthology will necessarily engage broader topics: colonialism, intergenerational trauma, gendered violence, land, language, and Indigenous sovereignty. The book will be both testament and intervention, insisting that Indigenous lives, especially those of women and girls, are essential and must be heard.
The Essential Voices Anthology Series has at its heart the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity. It intends to make less insular the various poetries of the world and to correct misrepresentations and misunderstandings in the broader culture. In other words, to go where the silence is and let the poets speak. We believe that a good anthology not only captures the zeitgeist, it can help shape it. When we look at the etymology of the word "essential," we see that the Latin essentia means "being." It is in this spirit of shared being that we publish these books. The Essential Voices Editorial Fellowship awards $2500 and gives an editor the resources and assistance to bring an anthology into the world.
