Preface: “Where Will All That Beauty Go?”: A Tribute to
Poet-Scholar Tiffany Austin
Emily Ruth Rutter

Introduction to Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era
Emily Ruth Rutter, Sequoia Maner, Tiffany Austin,
and darlene anita scott

Part I: Elegiac Reconfigurations

Tony Medina, “Senryu for Trayvon Martin” and “From the Crushed Voice Box of Freddie Gray”

Angela Jackson-Brown, “I Must Not Breathe”

Anne Lovering Rounds, “American Diptych”

Jerry Wemple, “Nickel Rides: For Freddie Gray”

Chapter 1: Laura Vrana, “Denormativizing Elegy: Historical and Transnational Journeying in the Black Lives Matter Poetics of Patricia Smith, Aja Monet, and Shane McCrae”

Chapter 2: Maureen Gallagher, “The Didactic and Elegiac Modes of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric”

Chapter 3: Anne Rashid, “Lucille Clifton’s and Claudia Rankine’s Elegiac Poetics of Nature”

Chapter 4: J. Peter Moore, “in terrible fruitfulness: Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death and the Not-Lost Southern Accent”

Emily Jo Scalzo, “After Charleston”

Paula Bohince, “The Flint River”

Lisa Norris, “Big-Beaked White Birds”

Steffan Triplett, “Slumber Party”

Sequoia Maner, “upon reading the autopsy of Sandra Bland” and “Black Boy Contrapuntal: For Trayvon Martin”

Part II: Hauntings and Reckonings

Danielle Legros Georges, “Poem of History” and “As Falling Star”

darlene anita scott, “A Series of Survivals”

Sean Murphy, “Bud Powell’s Brain”

Sarah Giragosian, “Nina”

Chapter 5: Almas Khan, “Black Lives Matter and Legal Reconstructions of Elegiac Forms”

Chapter 6: Sequoia Maner, “Anatomizing the Body, Diagnosing the Country: Reading the Elegies of Patricia Smith”

Chapter 7: Deborah M. Mix, “‘A diagnosis is an ending’: Pathology and Presence in Bettina Judd’s Patient.”

Tiffany Austin, “Peaches”

Charles Braxton, “Strays in the Hood”

Lauren K. Alleyne, “Poetry Workshop after the Verdict: For Trayvon” and “Elegy: For Tamir”

Part III: Elegists as Activists

Jacqueline Johnson, “Soul Memory (for Renisha McBride)”

Chris Campanioni, “#IWokeUpLikeThis or: The Latest in Space-Age #PostInternet Pajamas” and “rendition”

Cameron Barnett, “Uniform; or things I would paint if I were a painter”

Chapter 8: Licia Morrow Hendriks, “‘A Cause Divinely Spun’: The Poet in an Age of Social Unrest”

Chapter 9: Megan Feifer and Maia Butler, “Edwidge Danticat’s Elegiac Project: A Transnational Historiography of U.S. Imperialist State Violence”

Chapter 10: Brother Yao (Hoke S. Glover III), “Loving You Is Complicated: Empire of Language #4”

Chapter 11: Sequoia Maner, “An Interview with Amanda Johnston, Co-Founder of Black Poets Speak Out”

Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, “No Indictment (On the Death of Sandra Bland)”

Nicholas Rianard Goodly, “Skin Tones”

Jason Harris, “Appraisal (Elegy for As of a Now)”

Tiffany Austin, “Dark Milk: After Basquiat”

Prompts for Further Discussion

Appendix for Further Reading