2024 Hub City BIPOC Poetry Series Finalists

Hub City Press is pleased to announce the six finalists for the 2024 Hub City BIPOC Poetry Series, a first-of-its-kind series that aims to champion BIPOC/ALAANA poets working in the South today by offering two writers an advance of $3000 and publication by Hub City Press in 2025.

The finalists are Rasha Abdulhadi, Cloud Delfina Cardona, Diana Keren Lee, Aisha Sharif, Jeddie Sophronius, and Lolita Stewart-White.

Two winners will be selected by editor-at-large Ashley M. Jones. Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama (2022-2026) and the author of three poetry collections: Reparations Now!, longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry; dark // thing; and Magic City Gospel. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is Associate Director of the University Honors Program at UAB, founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and co-director of PEN Birmingham. 

Rasha Abdulhadi is calling on you—yes you, even as you read this—to renew your commitment to refusing and resisting genocide everywhere you find it. May your commitment to Palestinian liberation deepen your commitment to your own. May your exhaustion deepen your resolve and make you immovable. May we all be drawn irresistibly closer to refusals that are as spectacular as the violence waged against our peoples.

Cloud Delfina Cardona (she/they) is an artist and writer from San Antonio, TX. She is the author of What Remains, winner of the Host Publications Chapbook Prize. She is the co-founder of Infrarrealista Review, a literary nonprofit that publishes Texan voices. She has received editorial fellowships from Macmillan in collaboration with Latinx in Publishing and Texas State University’s Center for the Study of the Southwest. They have been a workshop participant at Tin House and Macondo’s Writing Workshop. Their poetry can be found in Prairie Schooner, The Boiler, The Los Angeles Review, and more. She currently works as the marketing coordinator at Gemini Ink. She believes in a free Palestine.

Diana Keren Lee is a Korean American poet from Austin. The winner of a 2024 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, her work has appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The New Republic, Pleiades, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from MacDowell, Yaddo, and NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow.

Aisha Sharif is a Cave Canem fellow who earned her MFA at Indiana University, Bloomington, and BA in English at Rhodes College. Her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, TidalBasin Review, Callaloo, Calyx, Rattle, and other literary journals. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2019 and 2015. Her book, To Keep From Undressing, was published by SparkWheel Press in 2019. She lives in Kansas with her husband and two daughters and teaches English at Metropolitan Community College in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.

Jeddie Sophronius is the author of the poetry collections Happy Poems & Other Lies (Codhill Press, 2024), Interrogation Records (Gaudy Boy, 2024), Love & Sambal (The Word Works, 2024), and the chapbook Blood·Letting (Quarterly West, 2023). A Chinese-Indonesian writer originally from Jakarta, they received their MFA from the University of Virginia, where they currently serve as a lecturer in English. The recipient of the 2023 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, their poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Read more of their work at nakedcentaur.com

Lolita Stewart-White is a poet, playwright, and filmmaker from Liberty City, Florida. She is a Pushcart nominee and winner of the Paris American Series Prize. Her poetry has been featured in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, the Boston Review, and the African American Review. Her poem “Healing” was featured in the anthology This is the Honey, curated by New York Times best-selling author Kwame Alexander. Stewart-White is an alumnus of Miami City Theatre’s Homegrown Program, a playwriting development program that nurtures emerging BIPOC playwrights. She is a Cave Canem Fellows Fund Project Grantee for her play-in-verse, Liberty City Vignettes currently in development. Stewart-White has received fellowships from the South Florida Cultural Consortium, the Miami Light Project, and the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Her films have been exhibited at the Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival, the Seattle Black Film Festival, and the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA).

Thanks and gratitude to our first round readers, Su Cho, SG Huerta, Lucien Darjeun Meadows,  Esteban Rodriguez, and Sanna Wani, and our poetry editor for this series, Jae Nichelle. 

Founded in 1995 in Spartanburg, SC, Hub City Press is an award-winning publisher committed to well-crafted and high-quality works by new and established authors from the American South. Its books are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West. Focused on finding and spotlighting extraordinary new and unsung writers from the American South, our curated list champions diverse authors and books that don’t fit into the commercial or academic publishing landscape. In recent years, Hub City Press has become the leading publisher of Southern poetry, with books featured in outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and on Good Morning America. 

The winners of the Hub City BIPOC Poetry Series will be announced across all social media platforms in August.