Building Solidarity Through Poetry
In April 2021 the South Asian diaspora poets collective Matwaala hosted a virtual poetry festival inaugurating its Poets of Color series. The event featured five Black poets—Dorothy Randall Gray, Cynthia Manick, Marsha M. Nelson, Anastasia Tomkin, and Loretta Diane Walker. Nelson’s poetry spoke to the moment, to a rapt audience: “Black men and women need to breathe / in a claustrophobic society / to relieve the anxiety / that George Floyd felt / eyeing the backseat / of a small squad car….” While Matwaala was originally founded to bring greater visibility to South Asian poetry, the series reflects the way Matwaala itself has become a growing and expansive community, mindfully working to create solidarity across identity groups through literature.
In 2015 the Matwaala collective was launched by Usha Akella and Pramila Venkateswaran to, leading its publisher, Spinifex Press, to issue a statement in support of the poet’s feminist indictment of Brahmanic patriarchy. Pramila Venkateswaran, former poet laureate of Suffolk County, in New York’s Long Island, is the author of eight books, including the forthcoming , which is an homage to the Jewish community of Kochi, India, and will be out in May from Finishing Line Press.
