Did your mother’s mad
loving, her venom,
make you stronger
than you would have been
otherwise?
Leona Sevick
Leona Sevick is the 2017 Press 53 Poetry Award Winner for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers. Her recent work appears in Orion, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Blackbird. Her work also appears in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. Sevick was named a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Fellow and a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholar for the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She serves as poetry reader for Los Angeles Review and advisory board member of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center. She is professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature.