Stacey Lynn Brown was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and studied at Emory University, Oxford University, and The University of Oregon, where she received her MFA. A poet, playwright, and essayist, her work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, The Cortland Review, Copper Nickel, The Rumpus, Natural Bridge, and The Southern Quarterly, as well as From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. Her book-length poem in sections, Cradle Song, was published by C&R Press in January 2009. Poems from Cradle Song have won awards from The Poetry Center of Chicago and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and the collection was featured in a spotlight interview on the National Book Critics Circle blog. She is also the co-editor, with Oliver de la Paz, of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry, with an anticipated publication date of 2011. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, where she lives with her husband, poet Adrian Matejka, and their daughter.

Interview at National Book Critics Circle:
http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/small_press_spotlight_stacey_lynn_brown/

On Poetry Foundation’s Blog:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/stealing-back/

Interview in The Daily Vanguard:
http://www.dailyvanguard.com/life-in-the-south-1.2269583

Sample Poem from Cradle Song

I.

When I was four, we drove to Nashville,
Grand Ole Opry-bound, and stopped
the night at a broken down motel
in Tennessee—shag walls,
mossy carpet, dank concrete—
and I remember standing in
the doorway as evening fell,
a busful of believers rattling their way
to the pool for a makeshift
baptism, the Amens and Hear us, Lords
ricocheting through the courtyard
as underwater lights glowed
the pool algae green.

They would come to him, the big
preacher man, and he’d lay
a palm across their foreheads, brace
them at the small of their backs.
They’d release themselves to him:
teethsucking the air before
falling back into salvation,
held under unstruggling and
splashing up anew all gasping
grace and sanctified glory
hallelujah til my mother shut the door
and made me watch tv.

My parents don’t recall it,
but that’s the way
memory works in the South—
the truth is always lying
in some field somewhere between
the bones of the fallen
and the weapons they reach for.