Desiree C. Bailey
“Intersectionality is important to my artistic and social spaces because I want to be in spaces where everyone is seen and heard, where there is an understanding of interconnectedness and ubuntu, that I am because you are. I want to be free. I want to write free. I can’t be free if we all are not free.”
“Bailey invites us to see what twenty-first-century life is like for a young woman of the Black diaspora in the long wake of a history of slavery, brutality, and struggling for freedoms bodily and psychological.”
“Desiree C. Bailey sings true in her debut What Noise Against the Cane. Wherever this voice goes a Caribbean sun travels with it transfiguring what a maroon might overhear—a call awaiting response.”
“Bailey can look forward to a great future as a poet.”
Desiree C. Bailey is the author of the acclaimed debut collection What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021), which won the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O'clock Press, 2016) and has short stories and poems published in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, the Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Kimbilio Fiction, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Poets House, The Conversation, Princeton in Africa and the James Merrill House. She has received awards from the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts and Poets & Writers.
Bailey, who writes both poetry and fiction, was asked in an interview about her relationship with line breaks in the context of both forms: “I’m realizing that whether I write in prose or poetry depends largely on story and the sentiment that I want to convey. I tend to go to fiction when I want to explore or imagine the psyche of a certain kind of person, or when I want to emphasize the human implications of a social or political issue. There is so much ground to cover, which sometimes can be overwhelming for me since I approach everything with a poet’s eye and ear, nursing the tiniest details and sounds, but I love it because it feels a bit like unfurling my wings. Poetry is fun because I am able to get carried away with the beauty without worrying too much about how it all fits together. Obviously, other folks may have a different approach. The poem can enter a room, whispering two or three words and then exit. It can scream in short reoccurring bursts. It can drone. The poem can wear so many faces and that’s exciting to me.”
Bailey has a BA from Georgetown University, an MFA in Fiction from Brown University and an MFA in Poetry from New York University. Desiree is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, New York. She is the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Clemson University.
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(c) Wilton Schereka
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