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Ankober Yewondwossen
She/her
Poet
Ankober is a child of Ethiopian immigrants fortunate to be born in Seattle & creatively raised by the Seattle Hip Hop scene at the height of its renaissance. Surrounded by a milieu of ingenious, burgeoning artist-groups from Hella Dope to theeSatisfaction; it was Hip Hop, and the Hidmo, which cultivated her pedagogy for community & the power of a beautiful, ideologically potent, well-crafted sentence, while grounding her in the ultimate tenet of the art form---being true to oneself. She is now a poet, writer & reluctant educator who believes in the power of words to sculpt reality & vice versa. She is passionate about teaching children to be the author of their own lives & is presently learning how to do so as a WITS Writer Apprentice through Seattle Arts & Lectures. She works as a community support specialist at Hugo House where she assists fellow authors in selecting writing classes. Ankober's writing, ever-inspired by the first-person narrative voice found in Hip-Hop, is confessional in nature & explores taboo themes such as the humiliation of migration, the excruciating limbo of being first generation, misogynoir as a previous roadmap for belonging, the limits of sanity, and the transcendence of divine grace, all culled from a womanist perspective. She writes for herself & with the goal to heal.
About Their Work:
If you want to know how Frantz Fanon would view summer programs for poor POC at swanky privileged campuses, if you want to know why “cope” is a poor way to describe dealing with rape and the kind of trauma where half the people you know died, if you want to delve into dress, fashion and all its moral conundrums, and feel compelled to read on even when aghast or near tears, Ankober Yewondwossen is your writer. Reading these essays, which twist and turn with all the writhing of a life, its humiliations and embarrassments, is a painful pleasure. Sometimes they confront the white reader, sometimes they confide, but they always interest and immerse; take the plunge.
Follow On:
ankober.wordpress.com
Website(s):
Books (for purchase):
Online Work:
i was published on poetry on busses once because ~ we are all poets ~
Read for Margin Shift: