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Charleen McClure writes and lives a few miles off the Chattahoochee River. A Fulbright scholar, she was a 2020 recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. Her writing has been supported by VONA, Cave Canem, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Watering Hole, Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon, New York University, and the Conversation Lit Festival. McClure's work has been published or is forthcoming inThe Poetry Project,The Offing, Academy of American Poetry's Poem-a-Day,Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. McClure made her film debut inAll Dirt Roads Taste of Salt(A24, 2023), written and directed by Raven Jackson. Her first poetry collection is a Blessing of the Boats Selection from BOA Editions, Ltd. and is forthcoming in September 2024.
“If you have ever been lost in a city, which is to say alive in a body, you know exactly how bewildering life can feel. Charleen McClure’s debut collection, d-sorientation, elicits an analogous sensation as unsettling as it is compelling. To quote the last line of McClure’s penultimate poem, ‘I hear a storm.’ Dear readers, take cover.” — Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure “Charleen McClure’s debut collection is radiant and searing. d-sorientation is an offering of ferocious beauty and relentless clarity. On these pages are tangible tendernesses woven through raging storms; writing miraculously from the eye, from the center of a howl is McClure, ancient-voiced, rooted, steady.” — Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie, author of Strut “Throughout d-sorientation, McClure takes up the wondrous, painstaking and radical work of being in ongoingly deep relation with another through life and death, both vexed and free of the thresholds. It is so moving then that the final poem of d-orientation, ‘Transfiguration,’ is a series of unstopped, open lines. Sustained note(s) of a seriously steadfast and unending music, blessed are we to begin to know it.”—Aracelis Girmay, Whiting Award winner, from the Foreword
