Nov 10, 2026

Digging Beneath Bones

teri elam

Hosted by Sullivan Summer

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Summary

Digging Beneath Bones, teri elam’s debut poetry collection, travels through memory, lineage, rupture, and return, illuminating the body that navigates this rite of passage—a Black, Southern woman of a certain age—moving through the comfort and discomfort of relationships, dysfunction, family, truth, and self. It explores memory as a concept, a need, and a loss. A portrait of caretakers, aunties, nieces, and Black boy joy, it highlights meaning through music, television, myth, prayer, and the small altars of daily life. Above all, it is a love letter to a mother from a daughter, looking through their kaleidoscope, shining light on the broken bits of colored glass that create an infinite number of shapes, holding their testimony and memory.

teri elam is a poet, essayist, and screenwriter. She has been a Two Sylvias Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize and Perugia Press finalist. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, The Future of Black: Afrofuturism and Black Superheroes, Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology, and Kwame Alexander’s This Is The Honey. Her poem “Counterpoint,” about legendary jewel thief Doris Payne, received honorable mention in december magazine’s Jeff Marks Memorial Prize contest. A Cave Canem and The Watering Hole Graduate Poetry Fellow, elam has film and poetry reviews and artist interviews in Birmingham Poetry Review, Heavy Feather Review, Callaloo, The Rumpus, Incluvie, and Rough Draft Atlanta. You can find teri at her website and on Instagram.

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