Jacinta V. White

Jacinta V. White is a teaching artist, poet, and certified corporate trainer and facilitator. In 2001, she founded The Word Project where she works with individuals and groups using art as a catalyst for healing. In 2015, she founded Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing to provide a platform for those to tell their story through poetry, creative nonfiction, and photography. Jacinta’s chapbook, broken ritual, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2012. She is widely published and the recipient of several awards, including the first Press 53 Open Award for Poetry and the Duke Energy Regional Artist Grant from the Arts Council of Winston-Salem/Forsyth County. To read Jacinta’s blog of her journey as it was taking place, and to stay abreast of what’s next, visit www.resurrectingthebones.com

Resurrecting the Bones is a divining rod guiding us past shores where ancestral ghosts have forgotten their names but still manage to write themselves home in between all the expressive lines in this collection. With a voice drawing its energy from an underrepresented perspective of religion and the black female body politic, Jacinta V. White offers the sharp notes of history, victimhood, and subjugation as a testament to the visceral injuries upon the backs and spirits of generations of African Americans.

—Jaki Shelton Green, Poet Laureate of North Carolina

Part meditation, part prayer, and part act of resurrection, White’s lush poetry evokes the complex interweaving of ancestry, praise, and everyday interaction that comprise black church life in the South. Her captivating lines demonstrate how the boundaries between the living and the dead, the church and the home, and violence and reverence, are inextricably bound in the African American experience. It is a family story and a deeply personal reflection on that history.

—Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, author of Setting Down the Sacred Past: African American Race Histories, 1780-1920

Jacinta V. White offers us a glorious history of places and spaces that do more than reveal the nature of buildings and grounds. This work ushers readers into the feeling of these spaces by giving voice to the hopeful people who dwelled there. Ms. White still senses a rocking in the not-yet-rotten wooden planks on the floors of these old places of worship, places where so many genuflected in hope and walked with a dignified faith. A wondrous achievement!

—Derek S. Hicks, author of Reclaiming Spirit in the Black Faith Tradition, and Associate Professor of Religion and Culture at Wake Forest University, School of Divinity

History, culture, place, space, religion, life, and death intermingle in these powerful, elegant, and rich poems. Whether read as research or simply for pleasure, this engaging collection is bound to transport and inspire you.

—Patricia Leavy, Ph.D., author of Method Meets Art and Spark

Jacinta V. White’s Resurrecting the Bones will not let southern African American history be silenced by re-zoning, gentrification, and useful forgetfulness. White’s poems are Dr. Sheila Smith McKoy’s “limbo time” in action. Each poem is a personal and historical guide through the richness and fullness of black southern culture and the mighty black church. White’s language is hard-hitting, tender, and cosmic. Her images are sharp and unforgettable. The poems are narrative with a lyrical pulse that pulls the reader deeper into the rural landscape. A must read!

—Tyree Daye, author of River Hymns, winner of the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize