Glenis Redmond chosen for the 2023 Poet Laureate Fellowship awarded by the Academy of American Poetry

The 2023 Poet Laureate Fellows are:

Diannely Antigua (Portsmouth, NH), Lisa Bickmore (Utah), Jennifer Bartell Boykin (Columbia, SC), Joseph Bruchac (Saratoga Springs, NY), Lauren Camp (New Mexico), Laura Da’ (Redmond, WA), Oliver de la Paz (Worcester, MA), Farnaz Fatemi (Santa Cruz County, CA), Nicholas Gulig (Fort Atkinson, WI), Peter J. Harris and Carla Rachel Sameth (Altadena, CA), Taylor Johnson (Takoma Park, MD), Yalie Saweda Kamara(Cincinnati, OH), Brandy Nālani McDougall (Hawaiʻi), Gloria Muñoz (St. Petersburg, FL), Sharon Kennedy-Nolle (Sullivan County, NY), Shin Yu Pai (Seattle, WA), Willie Perdomo (New York), Jason Magabo Perez (San Diego, CA), Glenis Redmond (Greenville, SC), Erin Elizabeth Smith (Oak Ridge, TN), Junious Ward (Charlotte, NC), and Joaquín Zihuatanejo (Dallas, TX).

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The Listening Skin and Pen Open Book Award

The Listening Skin, a book by Glenis Redmond is longlisted for the Pen Open Book Award.

Praise for The Listening Skin:

“In The Listening Skin, Glenis Redmond returns to the ancestors and the deep knowing that comes from being ever ready to receive the wisdom they give us.
She plants us again in the South Carolinian soil and reaches across decades and continents back to the motherland for historical context, for truth, and for healing. She does not flinch from racism nor the complexities of what it means to carry trauma inside the Black body.
These poems are beautifully rendered but don’t shrink. I am grateful for the depth and breadth of the music and the keen use of the line in this collection but mostly I’m taken by to the way Glenis holds us up to the light. In her sure hands we shine!” – Crystal Wilkinson
“Its first language was scratched from the land. A powerful, generous, and wise collection. The Listening Skin is an archeological tool that excavated my history, my longing, and my joy.
Now I know I can read the sky.
These poems will forever walk with me into the next life and the next and the next… Lifegiving, Joyous, Essential!” – Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
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SC Governor’s Awards for the Arts 50th Anniversary

The South Carolina Arts Commission is extremely proud of its role in recognizing our state’s most accomplished artists and advocates with the Governor’s Awards for the Arts each year. The South Carolina Arts Commission, the sole presenter of the Governor’s Awards for the Arts, initiated a film project telling the story of the awards for their 50th anniversary. The result was nine vignettes that look at South Carolina arts, culture, and history through the eyes of living, high-profile South Carolina artists who have received the award.  They are: John Acorn, Wilfred Delphin, Mary Jackson, Glenis Redmond, Tom Stanley, William Starrett, Leo Twiggs, Sam Wang and Cecil Williams.
See the video here: www.scetv.org/watch/scetv-specials. Glenis Redmond portion begins at 45:17 on the timeline.
Yours-n-Verse,
Glenis
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Universal threads: Poet Glenis Redmond, mom, daughters find life experiences bind them

One of my most favorite Poetic Conversations at the Peace Center with my family. This conversations is connected to my poetry. It is about lineage.

“Storytelling comes naturally to the three generations of women in Glenis Redmond’s family.

And one thing that comes out in a long conversation with the women is that universal truths and experiences emerge from a life’s most specific details.

Glenis is a longtime poet, and she discovered a while back that her mother Jeanette Redmond has a way of mesmerizing the room. The event was a book discussion of “The Color Purple” in advance of the Peace Center’s production of the Alice Walker classic.

Everyone was dressed in purple, Glenis recalled, but Jeanette “outdressed everybody, with her purple hat.”

https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/life/2018/09/07/poet-glenis-redmond-her-mom-daughtersuniversal-threads-storytellers-find-life-experiences-bind-human/1212008002/

 

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The Greenville County Schools Hall of Fame 2021

The Greenville County Schools Hall of Fame honors those men and women who have graduated from or worked at Greenville County Schools and made a substantial or significant contributions at the local, regional, national, or international levels in areas such as academia and education, arts, athletics, business, media, public service, philanthropy, medicine, military, or science. This year’s induction includes: Glenis Redmond, (Poet) Knox White (Mayor), Bill Evans (Teacher), Chuck and Sandra Welch (Education), Sandi Morris (Olympic Pole-Vaulter) and Ernie Hamilton (Lawyer).

 

They will be inducted on November 18th.

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My poems Showcased on the stage in DC

A Chorus Within Her

Oct. 30 – Nov. 14, 2021

A Devised Work by Gabrielle Brant Freeman, Glenis Redmond, Christine Sloan Stoddard, Carmin Wong, and the Ensemble

Directed by Alina Collins Maldonado
Choreographed by Tiffany Quinn

The first live production of Theater Alliance’s 2021-2022 season, A Chorus Within Her uses the lens of women’s experience to interrogate and explore the experiences of the pandemic year. Poets, choreographers, and actors have spent months conducting Zoom interviews, issuing social media surveys, mining their own identities and experiences to create one unified, experiential evening of theater.

Part ritual, part airing of difficult truths, and completely centered in authentic voices of women, A Chorus Within Her is a choreopoem that examines who we were before the pandemic . . . who we were as we survived the past year . . . and how we collectively move forward from here.

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New Chapbook: Three Harriets and Others

The Three Harriets and Others by Glenis Redmond

$14.99

 

Redmond has shifted herself in powerful persona for The Three Harriets & Others. Each voice is urgent and determined to survive, to find ways “to worship and swim” out of the spirit-crushing compromises forced upon slaves in the early centuries of America. Most notable are the Harriets—artistry and ingenuity meet desperation as each shape shifts to make it to freedom. We encounter a Tubman who seems to be delivering instruction for how to change ourselves into the night as she slips “into owl or hawk. Turn tree trunk. Become de hound chasing” on the underground railroad. Redmond presents survival as transformation in these powerful portraits. The need for this book is unmistakable, as Redmond drops us right through the “blue black” heart of escape.

–Amber Flora Thomas, author of Eye of Water: Poems

 

The Three Harriets & Others reimagine the agency and ancestral urgency of Black foremothers. Glenis Redmond raises her/their voices with fierce unflinching and unapologetic poetics. These poems offer an ancient, unshackled breath that allows them to “Spill ink like night clouds that clot what your soul cannot hold.”

–Jaki Shelton Green, NC Poet Laureate

 

The words of the Harriets and Others created by Glenis Redmond, provide readers with a powerful insight into the life and times of three resilient African American Women.

–Dr. Lynnette Overby, University of Delaware

 

Redmond’s The Three Harriets and Others  elevates the conductor of the Underground Railroad, the first published Black novelist, and a young woman known for her haunting slave narrative in North Carolina. Glenis is a South Carolina poet, and a quilter. These poems quench the thirst for the stories that should be essential as water.”

–Dr. Tara Betts, author of Break the Habit

The Three Harriets and Others

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Teaching Persona Poems in the Classroom

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How to Write a Glenis Redmond Praise Poem

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