“Banjo Be” by Maurya Kerr is the first runner-up of the 2023 Resistance & Resilience Prize, selected by Natasha Rao. We’re honored to share this musical poem with you.
Maurya Kerr
Maurya Kerr is a bay area-based writer and artist. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes and appears in multiple journals, including Magma Poetry, Poet Lore, and an anthology, “The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry.” Much of her artistic work, across disciplines, is focused on black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian. Maurya was a 2021/22 UC Berkeley ARC Poetry & the Senses Fellow, chosen by Jericho Brown as a runner-up in Southern Humanities Review’s 2021 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and won the 2022 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Her first chapbook, 'MUTTOLOGY,' was recently published by Small Harbor Publishing, and her second, 'tommy noun.' is forthcoming with C&R Press spring of 2024.
