This event was recorded on July 21, 2022 at Bonfire Coffee Company in Carbondale, as part of the 2022 Aspen Words Writers in Residence program, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.
Jamaica Baldwin is working on her second book of poetry, utilizing archival research to trace the legacy of her female ancestors from the deep south to the west coast. As a biracial woman she is particularly interested in how the legacy of colonialism and the global plantation machine impacted her female ancestors on both sides of the racial divide.
Aspen Words offers year round programs in Aspen and throughout the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado. This conversation is part of the 2022 Summer Writers in Residence program which helps developing authors by providing them time, space, and living accommodations in the Elk Mountains. Each writer spends three weeks in Woody Creek, CO, focusing on a current project, and gives free community talks and readings as part of their Aspen experience.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jamaica Baldwin (she/her) hails from Santa Cruz, CA by way of Seattle. In this author talk is a discussion about her first book, “Bone Language,” will be published by YesYes Books in 2023. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Prairie Schooner, World Literature Today, The Adroit Journal and The Missouri Review, among others. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, winner of the 2021 RHINO Poetry editor’s prize and winner of the 2019 San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Contest in Poetry. Her writing has been supported by Hedgebrook, Furious Flower and the Jack Straw Writers program. Jamaica is currently pursuing her PhD in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln with a focus on poetry and Women’s and Gender Studies.