Raye Hendrix
“I grew up in Pinson, but Birmingham is on my birth certificate. It’s always been a place that claimed me, whether I knew it or not. I moved there as a teen, but when I was a kid we would drive into Birmingham to do our holiday shopping. Seeing Vulcan’s green flame always felt like being let in on a powerful secret (and to be honest, it still does). Birmingham represents possibility in the midst of pain, hope in times of struggle. The late Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth said, “as Birmingham goes, so goes the nation.” I think that’s true. Birmingham is a forge. It’s a place covered in the ashes of its complicated past but that stokes a righteous fire. Birmingham is where justice goes to be realized. It’s diverse and beautiful and fraught. It’s a place that says, “It’s nice to have you here,” and means it.”
Raye Hendrix is a poet from Alabama. She earned her BA and MA from Auburn University and her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the winner of the 2019 Keene Prize for Literature and Southern Indiana Review's 2018 Patricia Aakhus Award. Raye's work has been featured on Poetry Daily and in 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Southern Indiana Review, The Cimarron Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, Cherry Tree, and elsewhere. Raye is a recent transplant to the Pacific Northwest where she is a doctoral fellow in English at the University of Oregon, studying Contemporary American Poetry & Poetics with a Crip Theory focus.