1919
Cover art by Brian Dovie Golden
“every poem leaves a bruise.”
- longreads
“The genre-busting poet/scholar behind Electric Arches and Ghosts in the Schoolyard combines assiduously researched facts and bracing lyricism in this elegiac exploration of the 1919 Chicago race riot.”
- O MAGAZINE
“rescues the lives long thought forgotten.”
- ADROIT JOURNAL
“clarion & haunting poems— some psalm-like, others percussive, even concussive, all technically brilliant and sure to galvanize adults and teens alike.”
- ALA BOOKLIST (Starred ReVIEW)
“On the centenary of the Red Summer, in an America hardly less violent and anti-black, Ewing wields a kaleidoscopic Afrofuturist style to illuminate a crucial piece of history and to imagine a path forward.”
- LITHUB
“crafted and tense, inventive and full of energy.”
- THE RUMPUS
The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the “Red Summer” of violence across the nation’s cities, has shaped the last century but is unfamiliar or altogether unknown to many people today. In 1919, her second collection of poems, Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost five hundred injuries— through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, illuminating the thin line between the past and the present.