Diamond Forde Reveals Alice Genesis
Acclaimed poet Diamond Forde discussed how personal history and cultural memory shaped her new collection *The Book of Alice*. The book is already generating conversation in literary circles for its innovative structure and emotional resonance. Forde offered insight into her creative process and the origins of the much-anticipated work.
*The Book of Alice* is a deeply personal work for Forde, centering on the life of her grandmother, Alice, a Black woman born in the Jim Crow South who later joined the Great Migration to New York City. When her grandmother passed away, Forde inherited her well-worn King James Version Bible, which became the structural and thematic framework for the collection. Forde employs a unique and innovative structure, mirroring the Bible's form with sections named after its books and incorporating imagined psalms and scriptures. The collection also integrates "found" documents like family recipes, a family tree, and U.S. Census reports to paint a fuller picture of her grandmother's life and the broader Black experience. This new collection builds on themes present in Forde's award-winning debut, *Mother Body*, which won the 2019 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Forde herself is the recipient of numerous accolades, including a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and the Margaret Walker Memorial Prize. Early praise for *The Book of Alice* has been strong, with author Kiese Laymon calling it "one of the best collections of the twenty-first century" and praising its ecstatic sound. Critics have highlighted the book's powerful exploration of lineage, survival, and the reclamation of narratives for Black women often left on the margins of history.
