Emma Bolden
“Four years ago, I moved back to the greater Birmingham area after eighteen years away. I returned to see a city transformed: vibrant, bustling, buzzing with growth and hope and opportunity. At the same time, I see a city where so many are denied growth, hope, and opportunity. I see a city weighed down by a history of injustices that, no matter how we may try to deny it, carry on to this day. For me, Birmingham means this paradox. It also means working for a just way to answer this question: how do we grow as a city without ignoring that paradox? How do we transform in a way that ends and, if this is even possible, repairs injustice?”
Emma Bolden is the author of House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae(GenPop Books). The recipient of a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2019 Literary Arts Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, and such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Seneca Review, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, and the Greensboro Review. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly and an editor of Screen Door Review.