The 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

In this revelatory conversation, two poets, and their poet interlocutor, explore the layered realities of slavery’s archives and what they tell us about the enslaved as well as a collective American history. From an inherited oral slave narrative and plantation ledgers to a compelling Reconstruction-era diary, this panel will address the tough historical realities of narrative control, archival silences, inherited trauma, and the present-day residue of institutional American slavery. Poets Artress Bethany White and Lauren Russell will share poems from their respective collections on the topic, A Black Doe in the Anthropocene: Poems (University Press of Kentucky, 2025) and Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), while poet Nicole Terez Dutton author of If One of Us Should Fall (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), curates the conversational flow.