Every Hard Sweetness

In Every Hard Sweetness, Carter-Jones chronicles Civil Rights’ era atrocities through the story of her family’s experience with an all-too-common practice in which Black men were wrongfully incarcerated in institutions for the criminally insane. The result is a stunning work reflecting on race, criminalization, and the devastating consequences of a Black father’s incarceration on his psyche and family, specifically his Black daughter. Told through a mixture of photography, ekphrasis, and erasure, Carter-Jones’ powerful collection creates an extraordinary record of her family’s life at a time of great suffering and upheaval.

Sheila L. Carter-Jones is the author of Three Birds Deep, the winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks Blackberry Cobbler Song and Crooked Star Dream Book. Sheila is a fellow of Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and a Walter Dakin Fellow of the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. Her poetry has been published in Crossing Limits, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Pennsylvania Review, Tri-State Anthology, Riverspeak, Flights: The Literary Journal of Sinclair College, Coal: A Poetry Anthology, City Paper, Cave Canem Anthology, Jewish Currents, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Women Speak, Mom Egg Review, Northside Chronicle, Platform Review, South Dakota Review, Shepherd University Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Butler Books: The Boom Project, Low Ghost Press, Labor, Rune Literary Collection and other journals and anthologies. She received her MFA from Carlow University where she facilitates writing workshops for the Madwomen in the Attic Program. Her work also appears in several volumes of Madwomen Anthologies. Her newest book Every Hard Sweetness is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd. in the spring of 2024.