About Tara Betts
Tara Betts is the author of Break the Habit and Arc & Hue. In addition to her work as a teaching artist and mentor for young poets, she has taught at several universities, including Rutgers University and University of Illinois-Chicago, and at Stateville Prison via the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project. She is the Inaugural Poet for the People Practitioner Fellow at University of Chicago. Betts serves as Poetry Editor at The Langston Hughes Review and is founder of the nonprofit organization The Whirlwind Learning Center on Chicago’s South Side.
Praise for Refuse to Disappear
What a revelation. In Refuse to Disappear, Tara Betts holds fire—sometimes, her poems are like beacons on a darkening day, sometimes her poems radiate the blaze of black women’s voices, then and now, never to be forgotten, sometimes her lines flame up and unjust history is singed, and you read, like you’ve found that friend who puts language to that thing you felt but couldn’t put words to, that home fire rescue.
—Cornelius Eady, author of Hardheaded Weather and Brutal Imagination
In Refuse to Disappear Tara Betts writes histories and lineages into lines, pleating language into reunion, tucking it into the page’s pocket for another to find across time—gris-gris, amulet, “my slingshot and my stone.” These poems shimmer with Betts’s fierce, devoted attention to Black Life. Like poems by Audre Lorde and June Jordan, these poems refuse silence and forgetting. With love and clarity and fight, they face fire and speak: “time may burn and i / refuse to disappear.”
—Aracelis Girmay, author of Kingdom Animalia and The Black Maria
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