Emily Abendroth

What are 2-3 books (regardless of genre) that you’ve read over the last year or less that really blew your hair back?

I can't get enough of Octavia Butler's short story "Bloodchild". The more times I read it, the more blown away I am by the complexity of the interpersonal power dynamics (as linked to larger socio-political structures of subjugation and resource distribution) given figure to in such a compressed space.

I've also been struck by a renewed excitement toward the incredible flexibility and capaciousness of the essay as a form when in the right hands. Two essay collections I've been delighted to have at the ready are Hanif Abdurraqib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us and Nabil Kashyap's The Obvious Earth.

Who is someone you admire who does work that you feel really benefits your community, and what kind of work is it that they do?

An organization that is local to Philadelphia whose work I've really been admiring of late is the Amistad Law Project. Founded in 2014, Amistad Law Project advocates for the recognition of the human rights of all people and believes in the intersection of movements against systemic oppression.

ALP has assisted dozens of individuals incarcerated in PA in their struggles to achieve justice and has provided support to countless organizing efforts, several of which I am also involved in and therefore have had the pleasure to see their impact firsthand. In this past year, their team gained two additional members -- Kempis "Ghani" Songster and Robert "Saleem" Holbrook -- who were both released after decades of imprisonment, having been condemned to die in prison when they were only children.

The presence and efforts and energy and principled commitment to social justice of these two individuals are being felt in this city today in a hundred ways

Emily Abendroth is a poet, teacher and anti-prison activist. Her works are often published in limited edition, handcrafted chapbooks by small and micropresses such as Belladonna, Horse Less Press, Little Red Leaves, Albion Press, and Zumbar.  She has two books: ]Exclosures[ from AhsahtaPress (2014) and The Instead, a collaboration with fiction writer Miranda Mellis, from Carville Annex (2016). Her work has also been anthologized in the collections The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral; Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics; and Best American Experimental Writing 2014. Recent essays and poetry can be found in Women's Studies Quarterly, OmniVerse, Jacket2, Aufgabe, Black Box: A Record of Our Catastrophe, Conveyor, XPoetics, Thermos, EcoPoetics, and Encyclopedia. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony and the Headlands Center for the Arts, and was named a 2013 Pew Fellow in Poetry. She is an active organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (a grassroots campaign working to end life without parole sentencing in Pennsylvania) and is co-founder of Address This! (an education and empowerment project that provides innovative, social justice correspondence courses to individuals incarcerated in Pennsylvania) as well as the media project LifeLines: Voices Against the Other Death Penalty.