from Forgotten Stories, Mid-America Arts Alliance (September 2021)

“Only in the last century have the histories of the oppressed been voiced in any form by anyone other than the oppressor. This is not an earth-shattering statement for anyone who has paid attention to the unrelenting, systematic indoctrination of what supremacy engaged daily in controlling, and/or exterminating the lives of Black and Brown people, and anyone else who questions authority…The Forgotten Stories project is an excavation, in verse, of the past. These works are not only a revisiting of events in all six M-AAA states histories, but they are bright lights on why these specific truths were forgotten.”  -Quraysh Ali Lansana, Curator