Remica Bingham-Risher

“In these pages blood is time, time is history and, in this poet’s knowing, deft hands a music rises from the ashes, from the bones, from the black women voices fathomed deep within her. She is their witness, their reclaimed testimony, their singing proof.” ―Cornelius Eady

“Remica Bingham-Risher asks questions of poetry, community, and responsibility that will inspire both seasoned and aspiring poets and educators.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Knowledge, illumination, and song unlike any I have known but that I might have dreamed.” —Elizabeth Alexander

Memoirist and poet Remica Bingham-Risher is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006) winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013), which was shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and adapted into an immersive dance and installation work by INSPIRIT Dance Company; and Starlight & Error (Diode, 2017) winner of the Diode Editions Book Award and finalist for the Library of Virginia Book Award.

Bingham-Risher’s most recent collection, Room Swept Home (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), is a work of poems and photographs – across history and her own family’s – offering a gloriously rendered magnifying glass into all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us. Nicole Sealey said: “In Remica Bingham-Risher’s fearlessly imagined Room Swept Home, the author’s paternal great-great-great grandmother and maternal grandmother cross paths. What is made from their proximity is not pure myth, but proof that ‘every house with heat got a woman’s hand in it.’ Room Swept Home is a house with heat, and Remica Bingham-Risher is the woman whose meticulous hand made it so.” A finalist for the Library of Virginia Book Award, the collection was chosen as an Honor Poetry Book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA), and won the L.A. Times Book Prize.

Her memoir, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions That Grew Me Up (Beacon Press, 2022), interweaves personal essays and interviews she conducted over a decade with 10 distinguished Black poets, such as Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, and Patricia Smith, to explore the impact of identity, joy, love, and history on the artistic process. The work examines firsthand the lives of these legendary writers to illuminate a road map for budding creators desiring to follow in their footsteps.

Bingham-Risher is a Cave Canem fellow and faculty member, an Affrilachian Poet, and a member of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Writer’s Chronicle, Callaloo and Essence.

She is the Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Excellence and Engagement at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, where she resides with her husband and children.

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Room Swept Home

Poetry, 2024

Room Swept Home serves as a gloriously rendered magnifying glass into all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us. In a strange twist of kismet, two of Bingham-Risher’s ancestors intersect in Petersburg, Virginia, forty years before she herself is born: her paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with “water on the brain”―postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery―nine days after birthing her first child. Marrying meticulous archival research with Womanist scholarship and her hallmark lyrical precision, Bingham-Risher’s latest collection treads the murky waters of race, lineage, faith, mental health, women’s rights, and the violent reckoning that inhabits the discrepancy between lived versus textbook history, asking: What do we inherit when trauma is at the core of our fractured living?

XI. the more ground covered, the more liberated you became

I am scared my mind will turn on me.
I am scared I will be naked in a burning
house. I am scared my children won’t outpace me.
I am scared my children (who aren’t made by me)
believe I am a sad imitation of the others.
I am scared I will gather in a room
where everyone will ask me to remember
and when I don’t lie they’ll say I’d hate to be you.
I’ve lived long enough to be scared my kidneys
will give out on me. I’ve lived long enough to know just
when they should. I have never shared my fears
with anyone; I am scared they will map the land
and take liberties. Will the women be ashamed?
I’m scared to ask. What will live again? What will die with me?

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Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up

Memoir, 2022

Acclaimed Cave Canem poet and essayist Remica Bingham-Risher interweaves personal essays and interviews she conducted over a decade with 10 distinguished Black poets, such as Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, and Patricia Smith, to explore the impact of identity, joy, love, and history on the artistic process. Each essay is thematically inspired, centered on one of her interviews, and uses quotes drawn from her talks to showcase their philosophies. Each essay also delves into how her own life and work are influenced by these elders. Essays included are these:

· “blk/wooomen revolution”
· “Girls Loving Beyoncé and Their Names”
· “The Terror of Being Destroyed”
· “Standing in the Shadows of Love”
· “Revision as Labyrinth”

Noting the frustrating tendency for Black artists to be pigeonholed into the confines of various frameworks and ideologies—Black studies, women’s studies, LGBTQIA+ studies, and so on—Bingham-Risher reveals the multitudes contained within Black poets, both past and present. By capturing the radical love ethic of Blackness amid incessant fear, she has amassed not only a wealth of knowledge about contemporary Black poetry and poetry movements but also brings to life the historical record of Black poetry from the latter half of the 20th century to the early decades of the 21st.

Examining cultural traditions, myths, and music from the Four Tops to Beyoncé, Bingham-Risher reflects on the enduring gifts of art and community. If you’ve ever felt alone on your journey into the writing world, the words of these poets are for you.

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Starlight & Error

Poetry, 2017

How do we save what’s coming? The love between two people, cut through by error and time, often marks the path for those who follow. In Starlight & Error, the legacies of love between aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers, children and their children’s children is re-told through the lens of imagined memory. In the difficult landscape of the present, is black love revolutionary? Are faith and forgiveness? Here, the history of love—fraught with fear and light, war and hunger, distance and gravity—is always asking: how do we transcend the mistakes of those who made us? Can music save us? Can the stars?

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What We Ask Of Flesh

Poetry, 2013

Blending biblical characters into a deeply personal history, What We Ask of Flesh tells of women through time, their spirits borne through broken flesh, through wombs and memories. The body becomes an instrument as words explore the mystical connection between what was and is.

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Conversion

Poetry, 2006

“One has the feeling reading Remica Bingham’s book that one in encountering a poet committed to making a career of this business. Her assured voice makes us imagine that she came to poetry fully formed and singing lustily such that it belies the achievement of this first book of risky, spiritual poems that can only enrich the poetic landscape. As we celebrate this new book, it is hard not to anticipate the riches to come from her pen. A most welcome debut.” —Kwame Dawes

Read What’s In Print

• Remica Bingham-Risher on the Weight of Names – LitHub

• The Pen Ten Interview with Remica Bingham-Risher – PEN America

• Review of Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up – Publishers Weekly

• Swept Away by a Search for Thresholds and Beginnings: A Review – diode poetry

• Inquiry, Lineage, & Archive: A Review of Remica Bingham-Risher’s Room Swept Home – The Rumpus

Listen to Audio

• 1168: Refusing Rilke’s “You must change your life” by Remica Bingham-Risher – The Slow Down

• A Conversation with Remica Bingham-Risher – The Poet and The Poem

• Ep. 43 Remica Bingham-Risher Talks Soul Culture – Nerdacity Podcast

• Read “We See ‘The Lion King’ on Broadway, I Enter the Pride” by Remica Bingham-Risher, selected by Rita Dove – New York Times

• Read “Interrogation Suite: Where did you come from / how did you arrive?” by Remica Bingham-Risher – Academy of American Poets

I am trying to carve out a world where people are not the sum total of their disaster (originally published with The Poetry Foundation)

But for the grace of God
one might begin and
this must be the life of a woman.

I will barely touch the surface
of all it took to keep them here.

They taught us to nod to others in the street,
to holler love, to knead eggs and butter and flour
into yeast rolls larger than fists, to coax and heed the land.

Looking at us, every god
must be astonished and envious—

what could leave us finished?
Grandmother’s grandmother,
enslaved by someone’s daughter,

enslaved and someone’s daughter, held
her mother out to us with eager, capable hands.

What couldn’t she grow, what couldn’t she stand?
And the man beside her, kissing her neck at night
before being thrown into war in the nation and abroad,

barreled back to her, her creases, her starch
and hand-me-down pots, her thick hair and threadbare dresses,

loved every falling-apart piece of her
down to the rocked-over heels on her shoes.
Every lie told says there was no love

between them but everywhere
I turned, here it was:

slow drags, belly laughs;
few reckon with their joy.
Most will make happiness a footnote

along with evenings on the porch,
hitting the number straight or box,

motherwit, innerlight.
O glory and genius
of unfathomable invention:

to raise overfull children
with a guiding soft hand.

Strange how everything can become
a symbol—a cushaw gourd,
songs sung to trees, hair luster, dreams—

any charm one carries can be
a hopeful, treasured thing.

They helped us find bottles
with corners of homespun shine
and place our lips above the hollow

until they sang. They were not angels,
they were not myth. They saved

pennies and baby hair and wedding rings,
grew big as a pianobox, broke through fever.
Their suffering wasn’t everything.

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