Of mixed descent, including Cherokee, Kimberly L. Becker is author of five poetry collections: Words Facing East and The Dividings (WordTech Editions), The Bed Book and Bringing Back the Fire (Spuyten Duyvil), and Flight (MadHat Press). Her poems appear widely in journals and anthologies, including Indigenous Message on Water; Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence; and Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits. She has an essay forthcoming in Unpapered, edited by Diane Glancy and Linda Rodriguez (University of Nebraska Press). Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart. She has received grants from Maryland, New Jersey, and Western North Carolina, and has been awarded residencies at Hambidge, Weymouth, and Wildacres. Kimberly has read at Busboys and Poets, The National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC), Split This Rock, and Wordfest. She has served as mentor for PEN America's Prison Writing and AWP's Writer to Writer programs. She currently lives in North Dakota, but calls the mountains of North Carolina home. www.kimberlylbecker.com
From North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green:
"The Bed Book masterfully calls out and talks back to grim truths and demonstrates why poetry is necessary and sought after in moments of reimagining where beauty might reside and need protecting. This collection fulfills its purpose as a valuable roadmap through the complex lineages of this oeuvre. Each compelling poem contains a world in miniature. Each bed is intense, dark, fertile, complicated, and wondrously overwhelming as they disintegrate into word portraits. Kimberly L. Becker makes poetry of searing scars and seething blood. Stunning and haunting language illuminates the ghosts of time and place with a vibrancy so visceral you can hear the pores of the skin, the chambers of the heart, the scream in the throat opening wider releasing truth and light."
