"won't you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life?"- Lucille Clifton

Brianna Bencosme Bidó is a Dominican-American poet and educator living in Danbury, Connecticut, where she is earning her MFA in Creative Writing at Western Connecticut State University. She is the recipient of her programs WCSU/AWP Intro Journals in Poetry Award. Her poems, ‘Doña’, ‘Pit Poems: The Pit’, and ‘Pit Poems: Iris City’, were selected by Raina J. Leon and Lupe Mendez to appear in The Acentos Review

Now more than ever we are hearing the urgent call for transformative poetry and vibrant literary communities like Tupelo Press, which lift up the under-heard voices of our society.

With your support and inspiration, I excitedly take on the joys of this opportunity to be an ambassador of poetry in our world, and to explore with each of you throughout the next thirty days this common life which we create and bravely share with one another.

Throughout the month I will need your help to achieve the goal of spreading the hope that I have found in the world through poetry. For years, Tupelo Press has supported the work of great poets, who alongside inspirations like Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and Gertrude Stein, have made it possible for me to attain a poetic orientation and understanding of our lives, which so importantly illumines the underpinnings of oppression that burst at the seams of our complex humanity.

It is because of fine literary communities like Tupelo Press that I am continually seeking the reveries of freedom in my poetry—that the dream be not luxuries, but a tangible, moving, transformative force that arouses us into feeling, thought, and action. It is to me that liberty in all its forms are a common sense human right. It is the common purpose that unites and ignites society in all its love and outrage. My poetics attempts to reach the ideals of that common property. It is a poetics that deals with the elements which all of us can possess and know: music, silence, imagination. That which is removed from the politics of patriarchal and racist systems. Removed from that which inhibits us from the access to our own language, memory, and the attainment of our dreams.

I extend my hand and graciously encourage you to join me in collaborating with my fellow poets and Tupelo Press in this invaluable mission to provide a space for voices like yours and mine to re-member, re-collect, and retrieve our personal and collective histories.

I am honored to be part of such a special project and eagerly await hearing from you your thoughts, experiences, and promptings. Your generous donations to Tupelo Press will contribute equally to my courage to write intensively for the next month as they do to a worthy cause that celebrates the humanities, the arts, and our lives.

To my donors, I will be offering the following gifts of gratitude:

Donors of $5+ will receive weekly letters as a window into the writing process

Donors of $20+ will receive an original poem prompted by words of their choice.

Donors of $20+ will receive an original ode/ tribute poem.

I hope that you will all come along with me and this exemplary press as we move forward in this journey. This is where you can find the poems:

https://www.tupelopress.org/the-march-2024-30-30-p...

IG: @briannabencosmebido

FB: Brianna Bencosme Bidó

Yours kindly,

Brianna