Photo by Natalie Jackson

teri elam is a Georgia‑based writer, poet, and screenwriter whose work lives at the intersection of Black Southern storytelling, place, and generational memory. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems and reviews appear in Prairie Schooner, Limp Wrist, Auburn Avenue, The Rumpus, Birmingham Poetry Review, Callaloo Literary Journal and in the anthologies The Future of Black: Afrofuturism and Black Comics Poetry and Kwame Alexander’s This Is The Honey. Her lamentation “Butterflies” was adapted into a Visual Poetry Project film.

A Cave Canem and The Watering Hole Graduate Fellow, elam is a Two Sylvias Wilder Poetry Prize finalist and a two‑time Perugia Press finalist. Her poem about legendary jewel thief Doris Payne received honorable mention in december magazine’s Jeff Marks Memorial Prize contest.

A graduate of Tuskegee University, elam holds an Ed.M. from the University of Georgia and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine. She has spent her career in human resources, learning & development, internal communication, and leadership coaching; most recently as an employee experience manager, helping leaders and organizations build clarity, alignment, and intentional storytelling.

images shaped my childhood: daddy always with a camera, mom with snapshots from her days as “puddin’” on a tobacco farm in north carolina and beyond, then me, and the house i always consider "home," 3110. these are just a few shots echoed throughout the book.

My first poem was my fierce and lovely mother, Viola Iris Bonnett Elam. Her eastern North Carolina lilt, robust laugh, fresh apple cakes, breakfast casseroles, our house always a gathering spot or place of refuge. She taught at Terrace Manor Elementary, where she was a Teacher of the Year; the same school where, in 6th grade, Mrs. Hettie Copeland had my class recite Langston Hughes’ poetry, and Mrs. Lula Francis took me to hear Nikki Giovanni at the local college.

There began my hymnal, the place I first dreamt of being “a writer when I grow up.”

Decades, workshops, drafts, rejections, and multitudinous revisions later, I was back home; Mom’s pandemic roomie turned caretaker. One night I left her up reading an early iteration of this book, many poems shaped from her stories of growing up on a tobacco farm. Around 2:30 a.m., I woke up and found her in the kitchen, eggs on the stove, oven on, grits in a bowl, trying to recall her recipes. When I asked, “Mom, what the world?,” she smiled and said, “I loved your book and just wanted to make you breakfast.” Whew.

I’m so thankful that Mom had the chance to read the poems about "Pudding" before Parkinson’s dementia stole her smile and memories. As she continued “traveling” (what she’d say when she caught herself forgetting), I continued writing...about aging, caretaking, the small mercies dementia brings; and my late father, who gifted me his creative genes. I submitted the manuscript a few months before she died, and just after my first Mother’s Day without her, I learned it was going to be published. When I released the final revision for printing, it hit me that this collection had always been a love letter to my mom.

And I hope that after reading it, you’ll want to go fix you a big breakfast too.