Bit.ly/MaplesMend

After a long journey, my poetry collection Mend, is finally in print! Mend is a collection of historical persona poetry that tells the story of the birth of gynecology and the role black enslaved women played in that process. It is written in the voices of the women to amplify their experience, and to show a range of their emotions. More than victims or slaves, these women were human beings.  

Come celebrate with me at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in the Vulcan Materials Gallery on November 2nd at 6:30. I'll read poems, offer a Q &A, and sign books. Drinks and refreshments will be served. Browse the art exhibit while you're there. There's parking on the street, which is free after 6pm.  

Tickets are free online at Eventbrite.

More words on Mend:

This is a powerful book that illuminates one more complex, disturbing chapter of the African-American experience, a nineteenth-century white male physician’s gynecological experiments on female slaves. MEND is a brutal story, lyrically told in the voices of three of those women, and its author has memorably created both a painful reminder and a beautiful tribute.

-- Kim Addonizio, from the runner up citation for The Donald Hall Prize

Elegant and lush, Kwoya Fagin Maples’s verse reveals the beauty, truth, anger, despondency, drug– induced madness, and survival of Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy.

-- Andrea Abrams, author of God and Blackness: Race, Gender and Identity in a Middle Class Afrocentric Church

Read this book now. Then read it again. The compassionate vision contained in these pages is as astounding as the history of the lives Kwoya Fagin Maples illuminates.

-- Camille T. Dungy, author of Trophic Cascade