Charis welcomes E. Hughes in conversation with Aurielle Marie and Courtney Faye Taylor for a celebration of Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water: Poems, a debut collection of lyric poems interrogating the generational implications of the Great Migration to Northern California.

Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, a debut collection by E. Hughes, marries personal narrative with historical excavation to articulate the intricacies of Black familial love, life, and pain. Tracing the experiences of a southern Black family, their migration to the San Francisco Bay area, and the persistent anti-Blackness there (despite the state's insistence that it is/was not involved in the US' projects of imperialism or chattel slavery), Hughes illuminates the intersections of history, grief, and violence.

At the book's heart is "The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant," a persona poem written from the perspective of the formerly enslaved abolitionist and financier Mary Ellen Pleasant who is thought to have helped fund John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Alongside this historical account, Hughes deftly weaves in the story of a contemporary Black family navigating the generational trauma resulting from the Great Migration: domestic violence and racialized violence, familial love and loyalty, the work of parenting, and the work of being a child. Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water reveals in its pages that, while many things have changed over time, ultimately the question of what "freedom" meant and looked like for Black people in the early 20th century retains the same murkiness and contradictions for Black people today.

E. Hughes’ poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Guernica, Poet Lore, Indiana Review, and Gulf Coast Magazine—among others. They are a Cave Canem fellow and have been a finalist for the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize, and a semifinalist of the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest. In 2021, they received their MFA+MA from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Currently, Hughes is a PhD student in Philosophy at Emory University studying black aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism.

Aurielle Marie (they/she) is a Black and Queer poet, essayist, and cultural curator surviving state violence. They are the author of Gumbo Ya Ya (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) and the 2020 Cave Canem poetry prize winner. Aurielle won the 2021 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, was the 2022 Georgia Author of the Year in poetry, and received the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. For their work in literature, Aurielle was named a member of Out Magazine’s 2022 Out100 class and was featured on Good Morning America. In 2023, she was honored as a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist. She was a 2022 Movement Journalism Fellow with Scalawag Magazine, a 2019 Lambda Literary Writer in Residence, and has received invitations to fellowships from Tin House, VONA, The Watering Hole, and Kopkind. Their work has been featured in American Poetry Review, the Poem-a-Day series, Poetry Magazine, on The Slowdown, Teen Vogue, and The Guardian, among other platforms. A genderqueer filmmaker and storyteller, Aurielle writes about sex, systems, and The South from a Black Feminist lens.

Courtney Faye Taylor is a writer, visual artist, and the author of Concentrate (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Concentrate was awarded the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was named a finalist for the NAACP Image Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and other honors. The collection has been featured in Essence Magazine, The Los Angeles Times and named among the “Best Poetry of the Last Year” by Ms. Magazine. Courtney earned her BA from Agnes Scott College and her MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She is the winner of the 92Y Discovery Prize and has received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell and Cave Canem. Her visual art has been exhibited at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art online and The Charlotte Street Foundation. Her writing can be found inPoetry Magazine, The Nation, and elsewhere.

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Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water: Poems--E. Hughes in conversation with Aurielle Marie and Courtney Faye Taylor