Rosemary Sekora is the publicity manager at UNP and not a poet. 

The New York Times Magazine featured Tracy K. Smith, the U.S. poet laureate and her mission to bring poems to the masses as an antidote to the current toxic civic culture.

In addition to “taking poetry on the road around the nation, focusing primarily on rural areas where most writers are unlikely to visit,” she’s also supporting other works of poetry.

The Careless Seamstress by Tjawangwa Dema will be published in March 2019 and is the next book in the African Poetry Book Series from Kwame Dawes. This collection is the winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets.

Dema is a poet from Botswana, an arts administrator, and a teaching artist in Bristol, England. Her chapbook, Mandible, was published in the boxed set Seven New Generation African Poets, and her poems have appeared in the New Orleans Review, the Cordite Review, and the Rio Grande Review.

And while I can’t share the cover yet, I can share Smith’s wonderful blurb:

Tjawangwa Dema’s poems are as bold, roving, and insistent as they are delicate and incisive. The Careless Seamstress is a ravishing debut.

So thank you, Tracy, for being a champion of poets everywhere and on our own list.