Chet'la Sebree, Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts, is the author of Mistress (New Issues, 2019) and Field Study (forthcoming from FSG Originals in 2021). She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from American University and fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, the Stadler Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. Her work has appeared in several journals—including The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, and Guernica.

Books by Chet'la Sebree:

Other poems on the web by Chet'la Sebree:
Three poems
"At a Dinner Party for White (Wo)men"
"The Lure"
Two poems
"Je Suis Sally"
Two poems

Chet'la Sebree's Website.

Chet'la Sebree on Twitter.

About Mistress:

"From the first poem in Mistress, Chet'la Sebree's voice gripped me and held on. Sebree's vision of the persona poem is startling: the narrator is both Sally Hemings and a woman in the present merged to a consciousness un-nesting the 'holler hidden in her.' Like Kara Walker's murals, Sebree runs from—and faces—the dark looming historical forces of miscegenation, enslavement, and the abjection of the black female body. The ghost of Sally Hemings as aberration, as mistress, determines the speaker's id; tugs at her solitary fantasies; a violent erotic invasion that she inverts and turns on its head with lines etched in rage. Sebree's language is a scythe that glints wildly. Mistress is truly an astonishing, unforgettable debut."
—Cathy Park Hong

"In her skillful, moving debut, Chet'la Sebree sketches one of the most charged and intriguing figures in our nation's history: Sally Hemings. While Hemings' contours are drawn from the grievously limited historical record, her interior life is richly filled in through Sebree's creative, forthright reckoning with how the two black women's relationships to men, motherhood, and the meaning of freedom might parallel. This palimpsest of 19th- and 21st-century lives, rendered in evocative, finely crafted poems, reminds us that our forebears' complicated desires can be no more or less easily understood than our own."
—Evie Shockley

"The story of Sally Hemings—mulatta, mother-matriarch of America—has never been told like this before. Thank you, thank you to Chet'la Sebree for giving voice to Sally's/her/our desire, grief, and rage. Thank you for this fearless poet, who dares to present Sally as mistress of her own body and fate, while raising the difficult questions Sally's narrative demands we ask: about miscegenation, rape, and what it means for a black woman to own her sexuality. Dismantling one of America's Edenic myths, Mistress 'severs silence' with a ferocity that runs all the way down to the root of each poem's language, its diction, syntax, and voice. Yet, even as Sebree's poems eviscerate, they are restoring history, teaching us how to 'bear this legacy.'"
—Shara McCallum

"Mistress goes where traditional historical literature cannot by immersing the reader in the heart and soul of Sally Hemings through the profoundly similar experiences of modern Black women. Chet'la Sebree uses her carefully researched collection of poems to engage Black womanhood, sexuality, and humanity, but also to upend the mythology surrounding the relationship dynamics between enslaved women and their masters. Sensuous, tantalizing, and gut-wrenching at the same time—Mistress is a must-read."
—Niya Bates