CHARNELL PETERS
Charnell Peters is a communication scholar, editor, and writer. Currently, she is a doctoral student of Communication at the University of Utah, where she studies race and communication. Charnell is the editor of the Ruminate Magazine‘s online publication, The Waking.
Un-becoming
Order Charnell’s debut poetry chapbook, Un-becoming, from Thirty West Publishing House. These semi-autobiographical free verse and prose poems explore Black feminine embodiment in the Midwest and the making, unmaking, and remaking of the body.
Read full review here.
Julie Moore: Poetry Editor of Relief Journal
Tightly woven together, Peters’ poems juxtapose one another like provocative paintings in a museum exhibit and build upon one another, using motifs of light and water, skin and pores, palms and hands, prayers and spirituals…To say that this first collection of an emerging poet is spectacular is not overstatement.
Dorothy Chan: Poet and Editor
Un-becoming is a collection that we need. Both skin and strength are at the very core of Charnell Peters’ gorgeous debut, which presents a body that becomes and “un-becomes” throughout various stages of girlhood, womanhood, and over the course of human history…The speaker sees her own skin in every facet, every corner, or in Peters’ own words, “what are we but edges, / made and unmade / by the waters of our mouths?”
Daniel Bowman Jr.: Professor of English at Taylor University
Charnell Peters is a poet who can “firesing the stones/in [our] stomachs to dust.” This debut(!) comprises bodies, hands “tendon-rippling,” and finally whole histories—elegiac, funny, tender, powerful—realized in a singular new voice from Middle America I didn’t know how much I needed.