m. mick powell (she/they) is a queer Black Cape Verdean femme poet, an artist, an Aries, and the author of the chapbook chronicle the body. Their poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize and have been published in Frontier Poetry, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. An Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, mick’s work situates Black queer femme existence and experience as rupture, revolution, revelation, and revival. She enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love.
During their time at Tin House, mick will work on her first full-length project, dead girl cameo. dead girl cameo is an archival poetic project that focuses on the lives and experiences of superstars Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Left Eye, and others to examine the intersections of celebrity, intimate partner and industry abuse, survivorhood, and death (including literal deaths as well as public and professional reincarnations that seek to bury the “original” girl). Using ekphrasis, erasure, digital collage, archival research, and imaginative/speculative nonfiction in verse, dead girl cameo illuminates the spaces where these women (and sometimes their girl-selves) live on.