Vera Beatty

“I am not dangerous, could file and hone myself

into your spaces, but somehow I do not think they

believe me, and pantyhose still don’t come in my shade.”

Photo: Furious Flower Conference Recordings, 1994

At the time of the 1994 conference, Adisa Vera Beatty, or Vera Beatty, as she was known at the time of the conference, had only been in the Dark Room Collective for a year. Beatty received her MFA from Brown University and later taught English at Medgar Evers College (CUNY). Beatty has contributed to publications such as Callaloo, Painted Bride Quarterly, Clutch Magazine, Culture List, and Spelman College’s L-I-N-K-E-D. Pursuing an academic career, she was selected for Howard University’s African Diaspora History Studies Ph.D. program. As a Ph.D. candidate, she received a 2016 Howard University Frederick Douglass Fellowship and was selected to be part of the inaugural cohort of ARCH (Archives, Research and Collaborative History) at Princeton University in 2018. In March 2019, she won the prestigious Sasakawa Fellowship that provides two years of full funding and a stipend.

Featured Poems

“Nat’s Lungs”

Interviews, Talks, and Readings

/ Vera Beatty reads “Nat’s Lungs”

Nat’s Lungs

How they cautiously ran down

the hospital corridors, lungs

and liver in a stainless steel

dish, rampant with cancer,

but not as bad as the “Duke’s”

 

How they placed the hands,

of the Negro with the golden

feathery light voice, tinged 

with raspiness, in the hand 

of the last real man, who ate

red meat, three times a day,

smoked Marlboro’s with no filter,

feared no sun and who sweats,

the permanent smell of gun powder

 

You two are joined, shallow pulses

and chests cut open, one set of 

organs switched for another, only

one of you can walk away from this

man made fate

 

Nat entered at the hospital’s Negro

entrance, and the “Duke” on the White

side, and it was the Black people that 

were convinced, the ones that knew

why, the “Duke” was breathing so good,

exhaling Negro breath

Related Links

Seeding the Future of African American Poetry 

Interactive Program Day III

Timeline: History, Witness, and the Struggle for Freedom in African American Poetry