NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, and Emerson Whitney’s Ghost Box, I started to imagine nuanced ways I could write Who’s Your Daddy and center the poetic in everything-it is poetic movement and its disobedience to causality that allowed me to move through space and time and affectively represent how I respond to the question of, who is your daddy?Ī month after submitting the manuscript to my editor, I step into Sydney Cain’s, aka sage stargate’s, exhibition Transitions at the African American Art & Cultural Complex in San Francisco. By reading genre-bending work like Alexis De Veaux’s Yabo, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Spill, M. However, in that rest, Ogunyemi’s voice continued to seed ideas. I’ve fulfilled my grant obligations now I can rest. In many ways, I thought going to Guyana was the culmination of this project. In response to a newsletter I sent out, a few weeks after my return to the States, my undergraduate literature professor Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi said that she could see books coming out of this encounter, and “Do try to write something about fathers, if you can do so without bashing them.” I now had letters, travel notes, newspaper clippings, and citations from articles, books, and videos I came across and researched. The project was evolving, taking on a momentum of its own. At first, it was a chapbook of epistolary poems called dear Gerald then I issued a call for letters to estranged, absent, dead fathers and patriarchal figures then, with funding from the Center for Cultural Innovation, a trip to Guyana in 2015 to meet my father. I started working on this manuscript in 2013. I finished up the first draft of Who’s Your Daddy in April 2018 and sent it to my editor, Kate Angus at Augury Books. What she makes is ‘a maze that bobs and weaves a new style whenever there’s a demand to love.’ What she gives us are archives, allegories, and wholly new songs.īelow, Arisa discusses how and why she chose the cover art for Who’s Your Daddy.Īrisa White on selecting the cover art for Who’s Your Daddy (Augury Books, 3/1/21): She channels Guyanese proverbs, Shango dreams, games of hide and seek, and memories of an absentee father to shape the spiritual condition. Poet Terrance Hayes writes of Who’s Your Daddy that:Īrisa White channels the ear of Zora Neal Hurston, the tongue of Toni Cade Bambara, and the eye of Alice Walker in the wondrous Who’s Your Daddy. Who’s Your Daddy is a lyrical genre-bending coming-of-age tale featuring a young, queer, Black Guyanese American woman who, while seeking to define her own place in the world, negotiates an estranged relationship with her father.
We are thrilled to bring you this exclusive first look at the cover of Arisa White’s forthcoming poetic memoir, Who’s Your Daddy, out from Augury Books on March 1, 2021.