Artress Bethany White

Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the author of the collection of poems Fast Fat Girls in Pink Hot Pants (2012) about her experiences in the urban North and rural South. Recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as the Harvard Review, Poet Lore, Ecotone, The Account, Pleiades, and Solstice.  New essays, “Sonny Boy” and “A Lynching in North Carolina,” appear in The Hopkins Review and Tupelo Quarterly. Her most recent literary/cultural criticism, “Appalachian Literature and Race Relations in the Newer South: Homogeneity and History in Ron Rash's Burning Bright and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard,” appears in Seeking Home: Marginalization and Representation in Appalachian Literature and Song (University of Tennessee Press, 2017). She has received The Mona Van Duyn Scholarship in poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Mary Hambidge Distinguished Fellowship from the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts for her nonfiction. She is visiting assistant professor of American cultural studies at Albright College in Pennsylvania. 

Black Women and Survival in the Modern World: Camille Dungy’s Guidebook to Relative Strangers

Reviewed by Artress Bethany White

I, like many Americans, recently read that Erica Garner, the daughter of slain African American police suspect, Eric Garner, died shortly after giving birth. She named her son Eric, after her father who was killed in a street bust for selling loose cigarettes. In the aftermath of her father’s death, Erica became an outspoken activist. In turn, her sudden death at the age of twenty-seven, after becoming a new mother, foregrounds the price many people of color pay for striving to survive in America.

African American women are not a monolith, and the stories of black female survival are varied and complex. Camille Dungy’s Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W. W. Norton and Company, 2017) joins the current roster of black women’s memoir on an enthusiastic upbeat. In it, she chronicles a broad swath through the demands of motherhood, the writing life, and travel as lived life and survival tale. (More …)

Pull and Drag

by Artress Bethany White

 “I have to confess that my own aquatic skills came about through a mix of parental responsibility and federal desegregation.”

I rarely see any African Americans swimming in my gym pool in Knoxville, Tennessee. I always imagine that other members of the gym are amazed to see me doing laps. Most of them probably believe that black people can’t swim and I’m just a cultural anomaly. I say this because just recently I caught another article in the news about the high number of African Americans who acknowledge not being able to swim—a number much higher than other racial groups on national average. My gut twisted when I read it in that way that most people experience when they realize they have risen above a statistic but know that this does not make the statistic incorrect. I have to confess that my own aquatic skills came about through a mix of parental responsibility and federal desegregation.(More …)