The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Winter Literature Grant to Queens College MFA alum zakia henderson-brown for her upcoming collection of poems “Power Theory”.

Since 2007 the foundation has supported and fostered talented artists of all kinds, enabling them to enhance their craft and realize their artistic vision. The awards are established to support and encourage artists residing in New York City who are currently working in music, visual arts, performance and literature.

zakia henderson-brown is a 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Poetry Fellow and the author of What Kind of Omen Am I, winner of Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, selected by Cate Marvin. She was a Poets House Emerging Poets fellow, and has received additional fellowships and support from the Fine Arts Work Center, Callaloo Journal, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Cave Canem. Her poems have appeared in Adroit, African American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, the Brooklyn Review, Burner Magazine, Epiphany, Little Patuxent Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Reverie, No, Dear, North American Review, Obsidian, the Offing, Thethepoetry.com, Torch, Under a Warm Green Linden, Vinyl, Washington Square Review, and the anthologies New Daughters of Africa (Amistad: 2019) and Why I Am Not a Painter (Argos: 2011).

She has worked as a community organizer at Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE) and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement; as a researcher at UNITE HERE!, a resource coordinator at Break the Chains: Communities of Color and the War on Drugs; and as a research associate at the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College. She completed the 2010 Activate! organizing fellowship at Social Justice Leadership and is an emerita board member of the Brooklyn Movement Center, where she co-founded the anti-gendered and sexualized street harassment collective, No Disrespect.

zakia was selected as a finalist for the 2021 Publishers Weekly Star to Watch program, selected as a finalist for the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize by A. Van Jordan, nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023 by Under a Warm Green Linden and in 2013 by Beloit Poetry Journal, and has been in residence at the T.S. Eliot House, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Louis Armstrong House Museum. She currently serves as a senior editor at nonprofit publisher The New Press. She is a Brooklyn native and loyalist.

Power Theory focuses on how different actors navigate, exercise, and grapple with power across different contexts. Overall, the project focuses on the mundane, fraught, and necessary ways we connect with one another in the natural and socially constructed worlds, across both time and circumstance. But these poems also explore the ways we alternately wield and relinquish power *in order to* connect, especially in times of great conflict. Some of these poems explore family loss, and the ensuing grief that comes along with it; the sometimes transcendent experience of mourning, and how we must relinquish power to truly heal. Some of the poems in the manuscript explore how women exercise and navigate power in the face of daunting, entrenched patriarchal obstacles. Still others of these poems explore how to grapple with power in a racialized and social justice context, the seemingly never-ending push and pull that we all must engage. The poems explore all of these while remaining at turns tonally playful and somber, and experimenting with conventions of the line and sonnets.

Please visit zakia’s website or Instagram for more information.