Unbury Our Dead With Song

Melissa Tuckey is the author of “Tenuous Chapel,” a book of poems selected by Charles Simic for the ABZ Press First Book Prize. She is also editor of “Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology.” A chapbook of Ms. Tuckey’s work, “Rope as Witness,” was published by Pudding House Press. Her honors include a fellowship at Black Earth Institute, a winter fellowship at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and writing fellowships from DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities as well as the Ohio Arts Council. From 2019-2020, Ms. Tuckey served as Poet Laureate of Tompkins County. She is emeritus fellow at Black Earth Institute and a co-founder of Split This Rock, a national poetry organization dedicated to supporting socially engaged poetry.

Ms. Tuckey’s individual poems have been anthologized in collections that include “D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology,” “The Ecopoetry Anthology,” “Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing,” “Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: The Extraordinary Work of WritersCorps Teachers,” and “Truth To Power: Writers Respond To The Rhetoric Of Hate And Fear.”

Ms. Tuckey lives in Ithaca, New York, where she leads community-based poetry workshops.

Mũkoma Wa Ngũgĩ is an author, poet, and Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. His works include “The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership” and the novels “Mrs. Shaw,” “Black Star Nairobi,” “Nairobi Heat,” and “Unbury Our Dead With Song” (May 2021), as well as two books of poetry and numerous political columns for African and international publications. In 2014, Professor Ngũgĩ co-founded the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature with the goal of recognizing writing in African languages and encouraging translation from, between, and into African languages. He has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Penguin Prize for African Writing; in 2013, NewAfrican magazine named him one of their 100 Most Influential Africans. The son of world-renowned African writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Professor Ngũgĩ holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.