Ashley Elizabeth

About the Artist

Ashley Elizabeth (she/her) is a Baltimore-based poet and winner of the 2024 Garden Party Collective Chapbook Contest. She is a Pushcart-nominated writer and educator whose work has appeared in SWWIM, Voicemail Poems, Rigorous, and Sage Cigarettes, among others. She is the author of four chapbooks, including red line and CHARM(ed). Her debut full-length, A Family Thing, is out now from ELJ Editions. Find her on IG and Twitter @ae_thepoet or her website aetheblkpoet.com Ashley lives with her parter and her cats. Note: Ashley is Black before she is anything else.   

Artist's Statement

I ask the tough questions and decide on a semblance of an answer. I make sense of the world with my words and leave the written record in poetry, as a modern-day Herodotus, documenting our existence. I write in longing for a better world where we, the others, are understood instead of misunderstood, heard instead of hurt, and loved instead of outcasted. As a poet, I am a reader, writer, and storyteller who challenges the status quo while celebrating the ancestors and those who came before me and will come after me. With my work, I hope some of the harder conversations (such as those surrounding race, war, beauty, love, religion, school shootings, and state-sanctioned violence) happen. I use my written voice to shed light on the stories of the untold and offer lyric as a type of coping mechanism. However, in many aspects, language fails. There is no word to describe the trauma in our genes or how we feel when another Black person is unjustly murdered or when another school shooting happens or when women are not able to access life-saving healthcare. With my writing, I unearth untold stories. I give them the space they deserve. I let them breathe. I allow myself to experience the anger and trauma passed down through DNA. I refuse to be silent.