Stories are the currents that connect us and move us through life.
My love of storytelling has taken me on an incredible journey over the past 20 years as an author, journalist, educator, and media maker. Whether it's creating poetry, fiction, essays, journalistic writing, screenwriting, visual art, or speeches for executives, I love how the power to craft stories has enriched my experience and given me the tools to help people transform their lives. Today I am the author of three poetry collections, a visual artist whose works have been shown in numerous exhibitions, and a leader in strategic communications for higher ed and nonprofit.
You can can learn more about me by reading my full bio, or downloading my media kit.
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Everything Is Necessary
Praise for Everything Is Necessary:
“Anderson twists to writhe ivory from bone.”
—Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio and winner of the Pulitzer Prize“[Keisha’s] poetry explores the many ways in which the African Diaspora is carried within our bodies, on our tongues–from sufferings under enslavement to the precarity of modern American life.”
—Patricia Spears Jones, author of A Lucent Fire and winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize“Everything Is Necessary is a ‘controlled explosion’…the poet’s journey is that of meditation, reincarnation, and ancestral lineage inside the portal of her DNA…”
—Anastacia Renée, author of (v.), Forget It, and Answer(Me)“Keisha-Gaye Anderson takes all the instruments at her disposal—things to make music, things with which to cook, stones that have blocked her way, that have made her at times detour, and fashioned these into weapons, things to keep the enemy at bay…Go with her. She is determined to find a way.”
—Mervyn Taylor, author of Voices Carry
Read the full press release.
A Spell for Living
A Spell for Living received the Editors’ Choice recognition for Agape Edition’s 2017 Numinous Orisons, Luminous Origin Literary Award for Poetry.
"Oracular and ordinary, sagacious and plainspoken, the poems in Keisha-Gaye Anderson’s A Spell for Living come bearing capital T Truths. Here is spiritual sustenance, worldly wisdom, and righteous reckoning. Working in tandem with her gorgeous and hypnotic drawings, Anderson's language opens portals through which readers are invited to step outside the finitude of time and body into a larger universal space of being and freedom. Here, the motherverse claims us as her children, calls to us in every line, come home."
--Lauren K. Alleyne, author of Honeyfish and Difficult Fruit"A Spell for Living is both indictment and exhortation, mourning and celebration, illuminating the routes to living and loving handed down by the ancestral powers. Keisha-Gaye Anderson offers us transcendental and luminous poetry in cadences as compelling as heartbeats. A book to keep and read over and over again."
--Olive Senior, author of Gardening in the Tropics"A Spell for Living is a powerful, breathtaking incantation, waking us up from the slumber of assenting to what many believe is reality--the destruction of our true potential by the culture. In a mythical voice that inserts itself between the world and the reader, the poems invite us to re-imagine the possibilities of our magic. We need these “spell poems” like we need water and air!"
--Michelle Yasmine Valladares, author of Nortada, The North Wind, and the Poetry Festival of NY's “Poet of the Year”
Gathering the Waters
Gathering the Waters Keisha’s debut poetry collection, was released by Jamii Publishing in 2014 and was accepted in the the Poets House Library.
What people are saying about Gathering the Waters:
"Keisha-Gaye Anderson is comfortable in the language and truth of her poems. Hers is a necessary voice for our times. These poems sing, dance, rumble and cry out like sweet thunder from the coral colored shore of her poetic terrain. I am in awe of these spirit vocals, these healing water sounds."
—Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, poet and author of Arrival and Convincing The Body
"Gathering the Waters is a potent book of poetry that can intoxicate your senses. Keisha wields her pen like a Samurai swordsman. Her poetry deals with the personal us, the intimate us, and the history of us. Keisha’s poetry takes you on a wonderfully exciting journey through the culture and beauty of being Black, with the promise of tomorrow."
—Abiodun Oyewole, The Last Poets
