"Poetry can change and transform the world."

Poet Bio: Abegunde is a Memory Keeper and ancestral priest who chooses to forget that words and days have limits. Instead, she chooses to remember - and live by - the words of a young Black woman in the 5th grade: Poetry can change the world. As a result, she spends her days and dream time chanting silenced memories into spoken histories. Her work has been published in several journals and anthologies, including The Kenyon Review, nocturnes, Obsidian, and Best African American Fiction. She is the featured poet for the Ancestral Masquerades series and Keeper of My Mothers' Dreams exhibit created by Lashawnda Crowe Storm. She is a Cave Canem, Ragdale, Norcroft, and Sacatar fellow. Learning to Eat the Dead: Juba, USA, her manuscript-in-progress about visiting South Sudan, was selected as a 2017 COG poetry finalist. On weekdays, when she isn't birthing new words out of sound and images, she shapeshifts into a professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the founding director of The Graduate Mentoring Center at Indiana University.

Why the 30/30 project? To write a poem every day. That is, to challenge myself to contemplate the nuanced world, to experience and document the awe of being alive this moment in time. March 2018 marks 2 years since I first went to Juba, South Sudan. I write because I cannot unhear, unseen, unfeel being there; and I cannot forget the people I met.

What will I write? Right now, I want to work on my Juba poems. John Paul Lederach inspired me last weekend to try a different form, so I will do this. But, poetry is organic, nothing is permanent, and 30 days is a long time: whatever wants to be written will be written.

Why support me? Your support will lift me up every day. And, you will have the opportunity to read new poems every day. Every dollar confirms my belief that community is the core of radical change, and helps the press place more poems in gorgeous books. Help me to help this distinguished press.

Why support Tupelo? Right now, the thriving of small and independent presses is needed more than ever. We who believe in freedom and who know that poetry and the arts can change the world - can liberate us to see who we really are alone and with each other - we must do the work of love through our words. Besides, what poet daughter of Osun could resist supporting a press called tupelo.

How does the press support me? Tupelo Press provides the canvas, I bring my words, accompanied by other fine poets, writing thirty poems in thirty days, all ours to edit and submit as we wish. 30/30 poems have been taken by over 90 journals and featured in over 40 published chapbooks, all so Tupelo Press can keep publishing exquisite and diverse voices that might never be heard otherwise.

Really love poetry? Consider the press's regular subscription 6/$66 series. You will get 6 books for $66.00 and stills support this fundraiser.

Please give today!

!Thank you. Obrigada. Gracias. Shukran. Adopt.!