The second poem in the 2024 SPACE Poetry Hotline series is “Prayer Circle” by Sa Whitley. Call 207-828-5607 to hear Sa read the poem.
“Prayer Circle” was published in the June 2023 issue of POETRY magazine.
Sa Whitley is a Black queer feminist poet and postdoctoral scholar in the School of Social Transformation and Women & Gender Studies at Arizona State University. They are a Cave Canem Fellow and a Poetry & the Senses Fellow with the Arts Research Center (ARC) at UC Berkeley and the ASU Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.
Whitley has published recent work in POETRY Magazine and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and they have received literary fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (2022) and the Community of Writers. Whitley received a Ph.D. in Gender Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA and has held previous academic appointments with the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University and the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. In their spare time, they go to queer dance parties and watch sci-fi shows that imagine liberatory and postcolonial futures.
The 2024 Poetry Hotline is a screenless exhibition available to anyone with access to a phone. The 2024 Poetry Hotline offers audiences a direct line to Maine-based and national poets and their visions for the future, and another medium to connect and inspire audiences with heartache, love, humor, rage, and regeneration.