The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2023 Winter Music Grant to t’ai freedom ford for her upcoming book, “Signs of Life.”

t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Tin House, Poetry and others. Her poetry has been anthologized in A Body of Athletics edited by Natalie Diaz, The Break Beat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Nepantla: An Anthology of Queer Poets of Color and others.

t’ai has received awards and fellowships from Cave Canem, Camargo Foundation, The Center for Fiction, Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, Kimbilio, New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Poetry Project. In 2019, t’ai became a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship inaugural fellow. She is the author of two poetry collections, how to get over from Red Hen Press and & more black from Augury Books, finalist for the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Claremont Graduate University, finalist for the 2020 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

My writing concerns itself with the fantastic, the futuristic, the horrific, the historic. My last poetry collection, & more Black, included many poems that were artistically ekphrastic in nature. That is, I allowed the work of artists from Carrie Mae Weems to Glenn Ligon to Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu to inspire and inform my creative processes. Sometimes I allowed myself to be in conversation with the work. Other times, I transcribed the visual into poetic imagery. Other poems were translations of sorts. This methodology has solidified into an art practice for me. One that relies on curiosity and collaboration, reflection and refraction.

My current obsessions include ancestral architectural praxis, Black farming, cultural geographies & topographies, domesticity, domiciles, dwellings, displacement, eminent domain, da hood, houses/homes, housing markets, home-buying (tries, trials & fails), historic home loan practices, generational wealth, gentrification, desecration of sacred spaces, inheritance, money, mortgages, Martin Luther King Jr Blvds, redlining, revitalization, sanctuary spaces.

The poetry manuscript I am currently working on, Or Current Resident, considers gentrification through the lens of the people who experience it on a ground zero level as well as the multiple personas “da hood” embodies as it contends with gentrification. Thematically, the work interrogates the violence of cultural disruption and displacement and the desecration of sacred spaces.

My fiction manuscript in progress, Signs of Life, considers how folks contend with loss and grief, but it also deals with topics like gentrification and over-policing of Black and brown neighborhoods. Sadly, these issues often find relevancy in the current news cycle. My inspiration for the novel came after watching the movie Fruitvale Station which details the life (and death) of Oscar Grant who lived in Oakland until he was killed by police in a BART train station. I couldn’t stop crying after seeing this movie because it forced me to consider the humanity of victims of police violence. The film haunted and antagonized me. I wondered what had Oscar’s mother and girlfriend and sister and daughter felt when they’d received the news of his murder. It occurred to me that I needed to write their story. To consider what happens after a life is taken. What are the stories of those left behind and who will tell them?

I see this as my personal responsibility because I teach young Black boys. I know their parents and siblings, but more, I know them. They are sensitive and afraid, curious and tentative, confident and intelligent, funny and brooding. They are so much more than a name on a protest sign or a hashtag

Personally, I’m always asking:

What is the point of my art if not to speak to and for my people?

What is the point of all these words if I am not saving a life (especially my own)?

How is it that we have survived this long? And who am I if I don’t acknowledge, archive and celebrate these survivals?

Please visit t’ai’s Instagram and website for more information.