Say/Mirror by JP Howard

Poetry. African & African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Women's Studies. Essay. Hybrid Genre. 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, Finalist. JP Howard's debut collection, SAY/MIRROR, is a dialogue of history and memory, reflecting on and integrating vintage photographs of her mother, Ruth King (a fairly well known African American runway model in Harlem during the 1940's and 1950's) with snapshots from the poet's own childhood. This manuscript began to emerge when Howard gained access to a large collection of her mother's modeling photos, as well as some local Harlem magazine and newspaper clippings, and was thereby offered a window into her heyday, begging comparison to and recollection of a complex motherhood away from the spotlight. Here is a project that seeks to use poetry as both memoir and biography, alongside the evocative nostalgia of vintage image—a map from which Howard has pieced together the bright but uneven path of growing up in the shadow of a "model" mother. The atlas of SAY/MIRROR charts the islands of the poet and her mother's overlapping lives—unearthing the shared experiences of a single parent and only child, coming to terms with each other in the 1970's and 80's: a socio-historical-emotional retelling of the life of a diva through a daughter's eyes, with both parent and child learning to navigate the rocky terrain therein.