Hope Wabuke, UNL Creative Writing professor, launches her new book of poetry, THE BODY FAMILY. She will be in discussion with poet Aracelis Girmay, author of THE BLACK MARIA.



A lyrical and imagistic poetry collection, THE BODY FAMILY tells the story of a family’s journey to flee the murderous reign of Uganda’s Idi Amin only to land in a racist American landscape. Wabuke excavates personal and ancestral history to bring these poems to wrenching life, articulating what it means to be a Black girl becoming a Black woman while navigating a diaspora haunted by British colonization and American enslavement.



Safia Elhillo writes: “In lush, cinematic poems, Hope Wabuke’s THE BODY FAMILY chronicles leaving, arrival, and the dangers on either side. The poems are taut and precise, and together sing a kaleidoscopic song of Blackness, diaspora, and coming of age. I love this book, and I learn from this book.”



Hope Wabuke is a Ugandan American poet, essayist, and writer. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir PLEASE DON’T KILL MY BLACK SON PLEASE. Hope has published in The Guardian, The Root, Los Angeles Review of Books, and NPR among others. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a founding board member and former Media & Communications Director for the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction.



Aracelis Girmay is the author of three books of poems: THE BLACK MARIA, TEETH, and KINGDOM ANIMALIA, which won the 2011 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is also the author/illustrator of the collage-based picture book CHANGING, CHANGING. She is the editor of HOW TO CARRY WATER: SELECTED POEMS OF LUCILLE CLIFTON.