Tara Betts of Chicago is the author of Break the Habit and Arc & Hue. A teaching artist and mentor for young poets, she has taught at Rutgers University, University of Illinois-Chicago, and Stateville Prison via Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project. The Inaugural Poet for The People Practitioner Fellow at University of Chicago, Tara is also Poetry Editor at The Langston Hughes Review and founder of the nonprofit organization The Whirlwind Learning Center on Chicago’s South Side.
Of Refuse to Disappear, Cynthia Arrieu-King says, “These poems study the obstacle course of womanhood—straps, cups, silk billows, lashes—the ways they are held to a flame, or made to dance like one—and draw a matrilineal line that connects all things. The bounce and weft of Betts’ line meets the readers in the actual: in hot sauce, FUBU, Sin-dee and Alexandra from Tangerine, Simone Biles and on. Again and again we meet the power of Black women whose name she says as poetic prayer.”