The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: "Fear of Dogs & Other Animals" by Shauna M. Morgan

This selection comes from the chapbook Fear of Dogs & Other Animals, available from Central Square Press. Order your copy here.

The author of Fear of Dogs & Other Animals, Shauna M. Morgan is a poet and scholar who springs from a rural district in Clarendon, Jamaica and holds an enduring love for the Diaspora about which she writes. She teaches creative writing and literature of the African Diaspora at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and her current research focuses on representations of womanhood and Neo-anticolonialism in 21st-century literature. Her poems were shortlisted for the 2011 Small Axe literary prize, and received honorable mention for the 2016 Salem College International Literary Awards Rita Dove Prize; she recently won Interviewing the Caribbean’s Catherine L. James prize. She has published poetry in ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness, Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, The Pierian, Anthology of Appalachian Writers Volume VI, Interviewing the Caribbean, Illuminations, and elsewhere. Her critical work has appeared in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and South Atlantic Review. Shauna lives in Virginia with her precocious 11 year old twin daughters.

Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie is the author of Dear Continuum: Letters to a Poet Crafting Liberation (Grand Concourse Press) and Karma’s Footsteps (Flipped Eye Publishing). Her work has been published in North American Review, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Black Renaissance Noire, VIDA, Crab Orchard Review, BOMB, Paris/Atlantic, and Listen Up! (One World Ballantine). Ekere has travelled across the United States sharing her poetry and ideas about healing. She has taught in New York, London, Amsterdam and Rundu, Namibia. Ekere earned an MFA from Mills College in 2002. She is a mother of three girls and an enthusiast of plant medicine making. Her cinepoems, herbal classes, and other work can be found here.