https://nailahwritesnovels.com/about daily 1.0 2025-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/1a9cf0f7-ab3a-4a3b-9b10-99d5952dd1ce/N+Mathews+Stickers+Headshot.jpg About the Author - About Nailah Nailah Mathews is a Brooklyn-based Black poet to whom books and Black lives matter. Their poetry has been featured in Lolwe, Hennepin Review, Lucky Jefferson, New Note, Rigorous, Hoxie Gorge Press, and the Black Lesbian Literary Collective among others. Their body of work is preoccupied with matrilineal trauma, queerness, uncanny Black girlhood, racial isolation, radical theology, and decolonization. They are a 2022 Wild Seeds fellow, 2022 Periplus fellow, a 2023 Anaphora Arts resident, as well as an alum of the immersive program for LGBTQ+ novelists at GrubStreet. When not writing, they are either ankle deep in other people’s stories or wrangling Olive and Martini, their two very bad cats. https://nailahwritesnovels.com/publications daily 0.75 2025-03-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/fe2571a3-e48b-427b-96a5-3efe02cf1eee/Better-Hands_Cover_96.jpg Publications - better hands Nailah’s debut poetry collection now out from Newfound. Summary Who breaks the cycle, and what does breaking it cost? Winner of the 2023 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, better hands eulogizes legacies of violence, underscored by a fervent desire of becoming. Mathews guides readers across and through “the infinity pink” in poems that drip a reverence tinged with resentment. Their debut chapbook engages myth, nature, and the body to honor the past and summon uncertain, ecstatic futures beyond. Praise “The eye—the I—is rigorously generous across these poems. They don’t attempt to rebuild a world or define a world, rather they do something more powerful and difficult: they dare an intimate lexicon and imagery wild and energetic enough to bare the overwhelm of the unknown world and our relationship to and relationships within it. The lines flicker, from light to dark, a wet shine, an earthen darkness, a scar, a seed, the body and body of language, bordering the ecstatic. Images tremble and transform, become both familiar and surprising, under the pressure of the speakers’ unrelenting desires and I was lucky to find myself wandering the blur between memory, moment, and the impossibility of what might happen next. Within these poems is a bold embrace of sensuality and how language can be our portal to collapse the temporal and spatial hierarchies of ancestor and descendant—the poems seem to say: we are who we are from and we become what becomes us next.” —Natalie Diaz, author of Postcolonial Love Poem https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/3e4875bd-4d94-428d-acdc-d2e6f0a92990/R.jpg Publications - Rigorous - Volume 7, Issue 2 (July 2023) Poem’s Featured: invocation against psychosurgery negrita homecoming https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/9215d96d-0896-4f77-b476-614474330e2c/TransparentBird.png Publications - Hennepin Review - Issue 6 (June 2022) Poem Featured: Zira https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/dda06403-b4a6-41a5-8037-4ea7cb365ae0/Vermillion.jpeg Publications - Vermillion - Flash Issue 6 (Spring 2022) Poem Featured: Cousin https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/ca4a99c1-6cab-4199-83ec-68768ad8b9a9/Outlook+Springs.jpeg Publications - Outlook Springs - Issue 7 (January 2021) Poems Featured: Earwig. invocation frances https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/dcc36c5a-413c-4dff-93c0-385fe65764cf/Screen+Shot+2021-12-20+at+9.27.42+AM.png Publications - Penumbra Literary and Art Journal - Black Voices and Experiences Online Exclusive Series (August 2020) Poem Featured: cradle https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/fe86526e-5a51-48b6-a73a-f0be53762234/TILDE%2B5%2BCOVER%2Bshop.jpg Publications - Tilde~ A Literary Journal - Issue 5 (Summer 2020) Poem Featured: hanlon’s razor https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/155f5468-0594-47e3-8a7a-6c5e83d2ab0f/Screen+Shot+2021-12-20+at+9.31.59+AM.png Publications - Passenger Journal - Volume 1 Issue 2 (Summer) 2020 Poem Featured: [untitled] (after Tomaz Salamun) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/b050e522-9b37-416d-bce1-cdff86d4804b/2.png Publications - Talking With Trees Poetry Competition plants & poetry 1st Place Poem, “Old ass tree” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/084746e8-a691-4cd2-b53a-7b9c9b6d74bf/Screen+Shot+2021-12-19+at+1.58.03+PM.png Publications - Hey, I’m Alive Magazine - Issue 4 (August 2020) Poems Featured: Seattle Atë southern belle https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/88c49f25-d04a-4e5f-b044-25c4c9a89bdb/Priz.jpg Publications - The Anzaldúa Poetry Prize Newfound Winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, Nailah’s chapbook better hands was published by Newfound in the spring of 2025. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/4c113d45-31a6-4cc3-8d05-f439e123ff5e/Serendipity.jpg Publications - Serendipity Magazine by the Black Lesbian Literary Collective - Issue 5 (Summer 2020) Poem Featured: Fathersong https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/70fd9901-ac6d-4522-a4b6-e938bc47bf16/HG.jpg Publications - Hoxie Gorge Press - Issue 7 (2023) Poem Featured: Ode to relapse and recovery https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/7091d481-a47d-4da0-a275-83e853e79f17/Awake-Cover-Kesiah-Bascom-v3.jpg Publications - Awake by Lucky Jefferson - Issue 1 (Summer 2020) Poem Featured: Blackbird or stone https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/0c89586b-998d-4c6b-9119-178b9803cf0e/Screenshot+2023-12-03+at+2.30.23+PM.png Publications - New Note - Summer Issue (July 2023) Poem Featured: Elegy for icarus + isaac https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61be5752c32df52391e8d437/6808ef5b-3ef4-4075-bef3-f7999da3885a/Moonstruck.jpg Publications - Lolwe (November 2022) Poems Featured: Night thief moonstuck aurorabore|atlas https://nailahwritesnovels.com/contact daily 0.75 2023-12-09