Welcome to the WORLD OF
OCTAVIA MCBRIDE-AHEBEE
Octavia McBride-Ahebee is informed by the convergence of cultures and the many ways people move throughout the world. Her poetry consists of narrative vignettes that are dense, emotionally difficult, yet honest.
POEMS
Octavia McBride-Ahebee’s poems present human relationships within the context of global inequality. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including For Harriet, Badilisha Poetry Exchange, Fingernails Across The Chalkboard: Poetry And Prose on HIV/AIDS From the Black Diaspora, and elsewhere. McBride-Ahebee's poetry collections include Assuming Voices (Lit Pot Press) and Where My Birthmark Dances (Finishing Line Press).
chapbook
PRAISE SONG FOR THE GRAVEDIGGERS
In 2019, Octavia’s chapbook, Praise Song for the Gravediggers was released. This poetry collection delivers a geography of women whose stories, once historically silenced, rise to the top to be heard and considered. Readers meet the likes of Aminata, a Malian woman, who crossed both the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea finally landing in an urban, U.S. city where she, undocumented, braids working class African-American girls’/women’s heads using the hair Indian girls/women donated to their religious shrines to receive blessings; no money. All this feminine intersection, this cast of global females, gathering in the flesh or in hair, in unassuming salons, in the hood is magical, yet buoyed by undercurrents of structural, economic inequities. This collection brings women from all backgrounds into a fertile space where world history, economic systems and current events meet to form an oasis of human exchange and storytelling.
PRAISE
“McBride-Ahebee constructs her own world — beautiful, grotesque, simple and layered — and demands that you journey with her.”
__ MW, Playwright
LILLIAN DUNN, former Editor of Apiary
The Ancient Romans used to call a person's creative spirit her "genius," and recognized the labor of setting it free as one of love and sacrifice. Octavia McBride-Ahebee's [work] is just such a labor. As her characters speak, she creates indelible sensory images of loveliness and affection, profound misery and anger, letting each co-exist on the page. The resulting complexity of tone makes space for nuanced and compelling human voices that might otherwise be categorized as "victims" or "villains" of oppression. It takes the full use of genius to notice and capture these contradictions, and a deep social conscience to care so passionately about writing them down.
SId Holmes, Filmmaker
With a naked rawness, Octavia McBride-Ahebee paints highly visual images evoking multiple emotions: pathos, rage, joy, sorrow, and love. These are images — with stories — conveying a sense of hope and uplift as well as a sense of outrage and a subtle call to open our eyes. [Her second collection] Where My Birthmark Dances is a poetic travelogue taking us to that well of humanity familiar to all peoples of this earth.
M.W., Playwright
With an intensity and heat that rivals blue flames, McBride-Ahebee’s poetry burns itself into the soul. Both particular and universal, these poems challenge any preconceived notion of reality. McBride-Ahebee constructs her own world — beautiful, grotesque, simple and layered — and demands that you journey with her.
BADILISHA POETRY X-CHANGE
Octavia McBride-Ahebee uses her poetry to give voice to women who have historically not been heard. In her poetry, the female body is often a metaphor for the physical landscape. [Her work] comments on imperialism and colonialism, and her poems are the case of the Empire writes back.
Poetry Collection
Where My Birthmark Dances
“I gave our child to the season of rain
the sounds its watery toll awakened
was her requiem”
