When Divas Speak in Tongues

About the Book

When Divas Speak in Tongues is an interlinguistic, intercultural, intergenerational, interrealities concert poetry book that features poetry in English and three indigenous languages—Anishinabe, Tagalog/Filipino, and Fulani/Fulfulde Pulaar. The language of music is delirious. The way between the different worlds of the three poets moves from the forest in Michigan to cities in the Philippines and to the vision of a woman who discovered her essential nature in West Africa. It talks about politics, love, family, and society from points of view that never converge. More than five years in the making, this is an audacious celebration of surviving the impossible.

About the Author

A Washington University and Carnegie-Mellon University graduate, poet Chezia Strand was born and raised in D’Ville in St. Louis but lived mostly in Baltimore. Her writing is a synthesis of intergenerational ideas and spaces around the concept of being human and living in the African Diaspora. She is the editor of the eight-member Diva Squad Poetry Collective Series of which this is the fourth book. Her work in Teaching Jean Toomer’s 1923 Cane and her articles on Caribbean writers Earl Lovelace and Kamau Brathwaite are a part of her theatre work, which includes her original plays.