Artist Statement

Racial justice and radicalization begins inside us. Humans may trace the origins of hateful and dominative thinking to inside our bodies — where our minds, our histories, our fears, and society’s violent idolization of whiteness through colonization collide.

These thoughts manifest in the physicality of our world by structures and systems that are designed for the failure of marginalized populations, which lead to the decimation of Black and brown lives. In Ohio, the disproportionate treatment of Black individuals in the penal system is grossly astounding. This triptych seeks to expose this illogic — this perpetuating of racism that infects and inflicts the very foundations of freedom and legal impetus in the country — by demonstrating our connections in the body, the internal, the cellular. We are one species. We are bound to each other. White supremacy corrupts our thinking and creates derelict ways of approaching systems, including corrections. We have the power to think our way out of these devastating structures. We have the power to see. To see our human connectivity. To demand reformation. To change.

Biography

Felicia Zamora is a poet, educator, and editor living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the author of six books of poetry including, “I Always Carry My Bones,” winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize; “Quotient” (Tinderbox Editions in 2021); “Body of Render,” winner of the 2018 Benjamin Saltman Award; and “Of Form & Gather,” winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She's received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, PLAYA, Moth Magazine, and Noepe Center at Martha’s Vineyard. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Guernica, Missouri Review Orion, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review. Visit her website, feliciazamora.com.