Slavery in Connecticut
American Story is a StoryMap about a woman named Vira’s escape from slavery in Connecticut based on the account of her life in the archives of Litchfield, CT and New Haven, CT. She ran away with another woman named Candace, and the poem “American Story” published in the Tuskegee Review speculates about their relationship and journey. The project includes ongoing communication descendants of the family that enslaved the women and efforts towards further acts of commemoration.
Slavery in Portugal
Elizabeth was awarded the Robert C. Bates Postgraduate Fellowship from Yale in 2018 to live in Portugal for a year and continue her research on the legacy of slavery there. In 2024, she was awarded a research grant from the New School to write poetry on the legacy of slavery in Portugal, focusing on the Vale da Gafaria burial ground in Lagos. She’s presented her research on this subject at the Archives of the Present Conference in Coimbra, Portugal in 2019 and at the National Council for Black Studies Conference in Cincinnati, OH in 2025. She is currently working on a collection of poetry commemorating the lives of enslaved African people in Portugal.
National Poetry Month with KtB
For National Poetry Month in 2025, Elizabeth curated and edited a week of poetry for Killing the Buddha on the subject of religion. The poems were also exhibited at a bar in Crown Heights, and Elizabeth hosted two public readings on the issue. Her editor’s note is below and you can read the poems she published here.
In June Jordan’s poem “These Poems,” she writes “I am a stranger / learning to worship / the strangers / around me.” We are at our strangest in the world of a poem, making and unmaking things we know and things we are learning. The words we make can be strangers on the page to ourselves and our reader, though we hope to come together in worship to the possibilities of language. This week’s lineup of stellar poets bring us down the avenues of history and queerness, have us consider angels and saints, and call directly upon the names of God and Allah. Some poems play with forms like the ghazal and the psalm. These poems are united in the worship of strange things like religion, spirituality, and love. The people and landscapes in these poems are examined with care and attention. What can a butterfly, a dollar, and a raindrop have in common? In the poems this week, these symbols talk to each and bring us to new understandings of worship.