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Nagueyalti Warren

Website
Years: 2003, 2004, 2006

Biography

Nagueyalti Warren is a poet and professor of pedagogy emerita in African American Studies, Emory University. Her poetry has appeared in Essence Magazine , African American Review, Obsidian and anthologized in The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, Cave Canem Anthology,Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, 44 on 44, and Spaces Between Us. Margaret, a persona poem, won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award (2008); Braided Memory Warren's third collection of poetry won the 2010 Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Warren is editor of Temba Tupu! (Walking Naked) The Africana Women’s Poetic Self-Portrait.     An academic administrator and educator, Warren has taught poetry and black women's literature at Emory University, Fisk University, Northeastern University, and Howard University. She has also taught African American literature at the University of Calabar in Nigeria. Her scholarship includes the monograph Grandfather of Black Studies: W.E.B. Du Bois as well as articles on Du Bois and the forthcoming book, Alice Walker's Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit. Her current research includes a literary history of black women writers.   From 1988-2005 she was first Assistant Dean and then Associate Dean of Emory University College of Arts and Sciences. From 2005 until her retirement August 2018, she was full-time faculty in the Department of African American Studies where she served as director of undergraduate studies from 2005 until 2015.    Warren received the PhD from the University of Mississippi and an MFA from Goddard College.

Poem

Prayer

 

Our Mother Father God

 

Do not forgive them this time

 

For they know what they do.

 

They have done it before

 

Before the Christian Era

 

Even unto now in this century

 

New but filled with pain

 

From rugged crosses to poplar trees

 

From nooses to blazing fires

 

From Calvary to Charleston

 

Do not forgive for we have not

 

Been delivered from evil

 

We have not been saved.

 

And Yours is the Power

 

To end crucifixions

 

Or have you bequeathed

 

The power to us?

 

Amen.