Chaun Ballard

Flight: Sunken Garden Poetry Prize Chaun Ballard

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Award, chosen by Major Jackson. FLIGHT gives testament to the struggle of skin color in contemporary America. Utilizing both innovation and tradition, Chaun Ballard's poems give voice to the silenced, proof to the disenfranchised, and life to the gone. The poems in FLIGHT unspool a rich and charmed history of survival into songs that celebrate the miracle of endurance in a country defined by the peculiar phenomenon of race; many of the poems in this collection explore (or allude to) the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson with a brilliance that is underscored by the poet's extraordinary sense of sound to etch a new reality in our ears.--Major Jackson