This book of poems presents a cross-generational conversation between Sally Hemings and the contemporary narrator about what it means to be a black woman in their respective landscapes, while at the same time demonstrating how little the ways in which we talk about black women and black female experiences have changed in more than two hundred years. In these poems, the speakers engage with historical texts, art, literature, and popular culture, while never allowing us to lose sight of their location within their own settings, the twenty-first century and the antebellum South.

With an intentionally fraught title, Mistress not only addresses the ways in which that word is perhaps inappropriate to define Hemings, but also about how we tend to oversimplify the ways in which we see women. The title is investigated through a series of poems, in which the speakers contemplate the various definitions of “mistress”: extramarital partner, skilled individual, school teacher, authority figure, head of household, etc. In this way, the collection asks readers to complicate their understandings of both the word “mistress” and of black women. This collection seeks to resurrect Hemings from the limited historical narrative she’s often provided, while also bucking up against the limited ways in which black women are currently represented in popular culture. Through a series of poems with “mistress” in the title, the book looks at how narrowly we use the word, almost exclusively as extramarital partner, but how the word’s different definitions are related to power and strength. When we strip the term of its positive connotations, it mirrors the way that we strip Hemings of the agency she had over her life and the lives of her children.

Chet’la Sebree is the Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and an Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University. She is author of Mistress (New Issues, 2019), selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize, and the forthcoming prose poem entitled Field Study (FSG Originals, TBD). Originally from the Mid-Atlantic region, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from American University, where she taught first-year composition. In support of her work, Sebree has received fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts, Hedgebrook, The MacDowell Colony, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. Her work has appeared in journals—including The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, and Guernica—and the anthology Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson edited by Lisa Russ Spaar.

Note: this talk is not recommended for children under 12.