Winner, 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
To Be Named Something Else is a high-spirited celebration of Black matriarchy and lineage—both familial and literary. Centering the coming-of-age of Black femmes in Harlem, Shaina Phenix’s debut collection, in the words of series judge Patricia Smith: “enlivens the everyday—the everyday miraculous, the everyday hallelujah, the numbing everyday love, the everyday risk of just being Black and living. There is absolutely nowhere these poems aren’t—we’re dancing and sweating through our clothes, terminating a pregnancy in a chilled room of white and silver, finally gettin’ those brows threaded and nails did, practicing gettin’ the Holy Ghost, sending folks to their rest, having babies, listening carefully to the lessons of elders, and sometimes even talking back. . . . To Be Named Something Else is a book of reason and reckoning, substance and shadow. It’s tender and wide-aloud and just about everything we need right now, when both reason and reckoning are in such woefully short supply.” Phenix’s full-throated poetry, with its “superlative combination of formalism and funk,” is assuredly something else.
Shaina Phenix is a writer and educator from Harlem. The 2021–22 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at University of Wisconsin–Madison, she is assistant professor of English at Elon University.
“Harlem is in Phenix’s poems the way Bronzeville is in Brooks’ poems. Lineage is found in all these poems through place—of girl to woman, of mother to daughter, of grandmother to God…all within the 45 blocks of Harlem. The poems are that specific and that profound. To Be Named Something Else reaches to the past and calls to the present. … Among the many contemporary formalists I have read—Patricia Smith, Marilyn Hacker, Annie Finch, Jenna Lê, Chad Abushanab, and Alexis Sears, to name a few—this is form like I have never experienced. Winning first place of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize hardly seems enough. This book changes the game.”
—Autumn Newman, Colorado Review, September 2024
“To Be Named Something Else is a collection that at once seems to have arrived from another world and is yet, clearly and deliberately, built from the incandescent materials of Black social life. These poems speak to the ancestors we know and love, the undaunted bards still walking among us, the sites and sounds of the Black quotidian rendered more surreal by Shaina Phenix’s honed attention. This book lives in a space all its own. It is a song of grief, flight, and ongoing overcoming.”
—Joshua Bennett, author of The Sobbing School
“This is the kind of poetry collection I ache for. Shaina Phenix’s invigorating debut alchemizes the properties of human spirit and generational circumstance to challenge perceptions about the contemporary American Black femme experience. Through a process of transmutation, the poems blend the personal with cultural criticism in a way that feels sacred, holy—like something a priestess-type could manage. Phenix refuses to forget from where and whom she comes. From biblical verse to new verse, poetic form to poetic deconstruction, in lyric and shape, this collection feels like a masterfully creative study of artistry, politic, inheritance, and sexuality in Black American Lit.”
—Faylita Hicks, author of HoodWitch
“Shaina Phenix’s expansive practice flourishes at the intersections of many things. Here is a book of poems, a book of prayers—part choreopoem, part lineage song—a trace of Black femme becomings. Phenix ferries such sonic multiplicities into the blackest ink of this gathering ground steeped in Black feminist practices and reminds us of the discipline of imagining that some prayers can be. Virtuosic, lush, mystical, vexed, ablaze. To Be Named Something Else is fierce with the urgency of survival and also so in touch with its inner starlight, as in: ‘I find myself thinking, that girl is something else. Find myself / thinking that girl is a little mouth of God.’”
—Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press, Miller Williams.
“I love poems that vivify and disturb,” says series editor Patrica Smith. “No matter what genre we write in, we’re all essentially storytellers — but it’s poets who toil most industriously, telling huge unwieldy stories within tight and gorgeously controlled confines, stories that are structurally and sonically adventurous, and it’s magic every time it happens. Simply put, when I read a poetry book, I want something to shift in my chest. I want my world to change.”
