Carmen Gillespie

 was a professor of English and director and founder of the Griot Institute for Africana Studies at Bucknell University.  In addition to many individual scholarly articles and poem publications, she is the author of the literary critical works, A Critical Companion to Toni Morrison (2007),  A Critical Companion to Alice Walker (2011), and is the editor of Toni Morrison: Forty Years in the Clearing (2012). Carmen has also published a poetry chapbook, Lining the Rails (2008) and three poetry collections, Jonestown: A Vexation, which won the 2011 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize, and The Blue Black Wet of Wood (2016), the winner of Two Sylvia’s Wilder Series Poetry Prize, and The Ghosts of Monticello:  A Recitatif (2017), which was the winner of the 2016 Stillhouse Press Prize for Poetry. Carmen’s awards include an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship for Excellence in Poetry and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and a Fulbright scholar. Essence magazine named Carmen one of its 40 favorite poets in commemoration of the magazine’s 40th anniversary. She shared her life with her wondrous daughters, Chelsea Gillespie and Delaney Bakst. Carmen passed away in August 2019 but her memory, her love, her work through all the lives she has touched.