Featured Writer #128: Diamond Forde

After receiving the King James Bible belonging to her late grandmother, Alice, Diamond Forde crafted a poetry collection that both destabilizes and reinvents what and who we think we know. In the James Laughlin Award winning collection The Book of Alice (Scribner, 2026), family histories stack on top of each other. This assemblage creates a sort of time travel, a spatial and linguistic portal through which we might begin to imagine alternative beginnings and endings. Forde has shaped a collection that speaks back to a Western canon, centering the women in her familial and literary lineage. This collection embraces poetry as a space to imagine alternative beginnings and endings for Black women and femmes. 

Forde vividly explores the life of several generations within her family tree, and draws parallels to biblical women like Lot’s wife, and women from her literary ancestry, like Toni Morrison’s Sethe from Beloved. With poems as recipes, creation myths, visual experiments, and gospel hymns, Forde reimagines what remains and what might be best left behind. She cares for and complicates the experience of living with inherited trauma in your body, acknowledging in “What To Do With Your Hands While Dancing” that, “sometimes to dance is to mourn with your whole body” and, in “Dance With Me, Alice,” asking “What’s a dance if not gratitude/ between two bodies?”

I am thrilled by Forde’s boldness in this collection—in not knowing while facing the past’s gaps, in lamenting the societal and cultural expectations that aim to make women meek, in re-envisioning a more joyous world for the women in her life, her ancestors, and herself as she breaks cycles of generational shame. Forde refuses neat, prescribed narratives; instead, she asserts her own identity and the complex individuality of the women who came before her. The Book of Alice rewrites and honors the self, within all its lineages, and gives readers permission to experience the joy within the labor of creating a better world. 

—Andrea Giugni

Andrea Giugni (AG): Diamond, thank you for the opportunity to read this incredible collection! Throughout my reading, each poem felt like a crucial thread in the narrative’s weave, crafted with equal amounts of precision and care, keeping me tethered to the page. 

This care is evident in the form each poem takes. You nest inherited forms (beyond the KJV Bible) to include recipes, the visual representation of an open book, and gospel influence, creating entirely new bodies of text. Within these forms, many of the poems are concerned with physical experiences of the body, ranging from sexual desire, the movement of dancing, and femme fatness. 

How did you think about the relationship between a poem’s form and its thematic content? How did these varied forms emerge?

Diamond Forde (DF): I’d say this challenge depends on the poem because so much of imagining the shape of a poem is learning to listen to the poem as it wants to speak. It feels silly to say that a poem will shape itself, but it does. 

Because most of the formal decisions I make about a poem early into its drafting process is a performance of ego. I’ve had to start writing my poems in prose blocks to discourage my ego from usurping the poem’s voice. I have to revise into form and structure because it’s the only way I know to remind myself to let the poem be. 

Every poem should have its own rhythm, voice, motivation, and drive. A poem might be a thing made, but it is also a thing making. Poems act on us, and in so doing, have agency, energy, impact. I’m just the caretaker, and as the caretaker my goal is to nurture, to read wide enough to know a poem when I see it, and to listen attentively enough to show my poem its own strengths. 

Which meant, at times while writing The Book of Alice, I had to confront what I thought a poem was, what I thought a poem could and should be, had to investigate what I’d been taught about poetry’s limits, and my limits, and to encourage myself to push past that into fatter and more decadent forms. This, too, was how I learned to listen to myself. 

(AG): I’m curious to know about how you navigated moments of archival erasure or familial silence. Were there moments when you came up against gaps in your family’s stories? How did you reckon with that? 

(DF): A major component behind the project was retrieving history from silence, whether that silence was a natural consequence of death, a familial silence, or systemic silence cultured by our supremacist relationship to race, gender, and class. One of the first obstacles to telling these stories was realizing how much silence my family had been carrying without our noticing.

Do you know how hard it is to ask folks to hold memories they can’t even hold any more? I found out that more than one of my aunts (and even my own Mama) had lost photo albums, family heirlooms, treasured keepsakes (even my own Grandma) because they couldn’t keep their storage units. Because they got laid off. Because they were too disabled to keep a job. Because they were living in shelters and running from domestic abuse. My family lost everything in more ways than one. 

And in the process of writing the book, I had to recognize how much we’d been fractured in silence, and that to write this book was a process of putting us back together. I asked my family to participate in the making of this book with me because collective memory is powerful in the absence of evidence. 

I convinced Mama and one my older aunts to hop onto a group call together. Told about the project to them, I was recording, wondered what they remembered about grandma, then witnessed the moment I faded, the moment they talked, really talked to each other. About everything: girlhood, motherhood, joy, and loss. They added to each other’s history; they completed a picture together. They amended the misplaced memories. They fought over the details. They confessed to each other things they were afraid to say about Grandma aloud. 

How fitting is it that when I went back to listen to the recording, none of their voices was captured on it. It was an archive the way it has always been to us—right there in our memories.

(AG): Often, women are responsible for the storytelling that holds a family’s shared history. In your poem, “Acts of Submission,” you write, “I want, only, to de-gender desire/ to transgress past the meekness planted in us like overgrown weeds.” 

How do you think about poetry as a vehicle for transgressing gendered expectations?

(DF): Since Ancient Greece, the public performance of lamentation has been distinctly and politically gendered, and to ignore that history is to ignore that the elegy, and poetry writ large, is and has always been constructed through the tension and politics of gender. 

Poetry is a vehicle for transgressing beyond most expectations—not just gender, but all of the sociopolitical and economic standards that we accept as “normal.” Because the impetus of poetry, and canon, depends on the shared, invisible belief of who is allowed to speak and what is allowed to be spoken. And as a Black woman poet, in a legacy of Black woman poets who have dared to transgress against that standard, each time I come to a poem, I am transgressing against the whiteness of the page, literally and historically.

I am asking canon to open to accommodate me and all that comes with it: my Blackness, my fatness, my woman and my Southern. Poetry is the mode I use towards that advocacy. 

(AG): As a lover of winding, family narratives, I love when a book opens with a family tree. One of the elements of the collection I found deeply moving was how you were able to clearly create a world which fully represented and complicated Alice’s life, as well as the lives of her daughters. 

Your poem, “Census of Daughters” is one of my favorites in the collection, for its stunning lyric, specific imagery (“Daughter whose eyelashes fan like a tarot deck”), and the complexity of each of the daughters represented. 

Each woman in the collection is unique, exhibiting their own evolutions across time. Can you speak to your approach to character development in your collection or poetry, generally? 

(DF): I’ve always been a fan of Impressionism, the tension between the artist’s hand and the image’s gestalt. The way you perceive an impressionistic image is all about proximity. Creating characters for the audience to empathize with is a similar journey. 

My goal with The Book of Alice was to create characters and scenes that encouraged the audience to lean in a little closer, to see, simultaneously, the scene and the hand that pens it. This work was especially important to “Census of Daughters” where I paint the daughters with broad, dissonant brushstrokes, samples in the large, overarching journey of their lives, but with small details we can work together to paint the larger picture of their subjectivity, too. 

My goal with The Book of Alice was not to hide the gaps in our history, but to paint with them; making the gaps part of the storytelling felt like stepping toward something that resonated like Truth. 

(AG): The poems in this collection stretch across time and space, working to hold together silenced narratives, suppressed desires, and a longing for connection. Simultaneously, they recognize the double-edged blade of inheritance, presenting an homage and longing for certain elements while acknowledging the systematic pain of others. 

How did you work to hold these two truths at the same time? 

(DF): What is the very nature of desire if not that double-edged blade? Desire can build us up and break us apart. We are re-defined by our desire. Desire is a persistent tension between the sweetness of want and the bitter inability to obtain it, and to believe that we are the only ones in the world who know that sweet wounding is the first lie we tell ourselves. 

Which is why I wanted The Book of Alice to be the first step I took in a long practice to stop lying to myself. I can’t say that it has always worked, but it at least gave me the space to be honest about the messiness of my wants. That the longing and pain that I write through in The Book of Alice is systematic is as much a consequence of the world we live in as it is any attempt to speak diasporically. 

The truth is, that if I want to speak about Black women’s experiences (and I do) I have to start by speaking on my own. I have to believe that my desires deserve to be spoken. That work takes some de-programming, but I deserve the truth. I deserve to resurrect the wholeness of myself from the silence I have been given. 

All Black women deserve that.

(AG): How did you think about approaching your second book after the publication of your debut collection, Mother Body? How did your thinking/ writing about Black womanhood, sexuality, and self-love evolve from those earlier poems? 

(DF): The Book of Alice leapt from the foundations that Mother Body started; I wanted to create and construct a “poetics of excess” from the foundation that fat poetics gave. 

Excessive poetics revels in “going beyond the proper limits” (part of the definition of “excessive”) and often performs as a metonym for Blackness, whereas Black folks are often described as excessive in physicality, volume, attitude, and expression. Even the origins of fatphobia, as Sabrina Strings calls us to recognize, has been rooted in anti-Blackness.

So, part of my goal in establishing and exploring a poetics of excess requires me to acknowledge the history of anti-Blackness contingent to all manner of life—including poetry. 

Poetry is not, and never was, exempt from the ideas of patriarchy, capitalism, and white  supremacy. To amend my earlier statement, poetry is not transgressive in and of itself. It is the transgression of our subjectivities written into the supremacist spaces of poetry that creates that power. The Book of Alice steps a little further to interrogate the ways normalcy inhibits us in all aspects of our lives, including through the journey of writing. 

(AG): What are you currently obsessed with? Who are some writers or artists that you’re excited about right now? 

(DF): I’m currently keeping my eye on Jameela F. Dallis, Darius Phelps, and Dani Janae who have dropped or are dropping some profoundly thought-provoking poetry this year. I’m also thinking a lot about the Atlanta music scene, so I’m excited to read 2 Chainz and Derrick Harriell’s new book The Voice in My Head is God. 

Outside of writing, I’ve really been rocking with improv comedy lately. I got a Dropout subscription after years of homies trying to convince me I should, and I’ve been binge-watching Vic Michaelis’ Very Important People.

(AG): The last section of the book is titled “Revelations.” What was the most revelatory part of writing this book? 

(DF): Recognizing that I get to be the next step in my grandmother’s legacy. She’s gone now, but her life and lineage lives in me, which means that I have the potential to carry that legacy far in my life, further than my grandmother ever could in hers. 

But also, I’m not the only person responsible for that legacy now. Readers who find themselves in these pages, too, help me carry this story. And together, we can reach so much further than we ever could alone. I am grateful for that revelation. 

Dr. Diamond Forde is the author of two poetry collections, Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021), a Kate Tufts Discovery award nominee, and The Book of Alice (Scribner Books, 2026), winner of the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award.

She has received a doctorate in Creative Writing at Florida State University, with a specialization in both African American poetics and fat studies, and an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama. Forde has received recognition in the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, nomination as a Kate Tufts Discovery award finalist, and has earned a Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Obsidian, Callaloo, and elsewhere. Forde serves as the Interviews Editor for Honey Literary, as an assistant professor at North Carolina University, and as an avid lover of colorful dresses.

Diamond is available for readings, workshops, panels, and more.