LUCY NEGRO, REDUX

"Part lyrical narrative, part bluesy riff, part schoolyard chant and part holy incantation" — New York TimesLucy Negro, Redux, uses the lens of Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" sonnets to explore the way questions about and desire for the black female body have evolved over time, from Elizabethan England to the Jim Crow South to the present day. Equally interested in the sensual and the serious, the erotic and the academic, this collection experiments with form, dialect, persona, and voice. Ultimately a hybrid document, Lucy Negro Redux harnesses blues poetry, deconstructed sonnets, historical documents and lyric essays to tell the challenging, many-faceted story of the Dark Lady, her Shakespeare, and their real and imagined milieu. Inspired by the book, The Nashville Ballet will premiere “Lucy Negro Redux,” an original ballet conceived and choreographed by Artistic Director & CEO, Paul Vasterling, in February 2019 at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. A collaboration of music, poetry and choreography, this contemporary ballet based on Caroline Randall Williams’ book of poetry of the same name is unique in process, content and format. The project uses dance and music to execute the author’s exploration of more than 160 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and her arrival to a thesis that the “Dark Lady” and the “Fair Youth”—the subjects and inspiration of these sonnets—were undoubtedly a black woman and a young man lover. Ultimately, in experiencing Lucy through themes of love, otherness and equality, the narrator, and thus the audience, finds a powerful female voice.

From BookSlut: “Lucy Negro, Redux is a proud rallying cry of freedom and delight in the sublime magic of Blackness. Randall Williams is keen on dismantling the trope of the Black woman as the Mule of the World, a voiceless pleasure thing. Combining history with honesty and the sting of personal memories, Lucy is no man's "exotic" land to claim. She rises above, radical mortal instrument of God's beauty.” - Vanessa Willoughby. Full review: http://www.bookslut.com/poetry/2015_09_021280.php, From Chapter 16: “While the premise of Lucy Negro, Redux might be academic, the collection couldn’t be further from the kind of antique manuscripts that may only be touched with gloves. These poems are tangible, very much of our own turbulent world. As the first poem, “BlackLucyNegro I,” explains, “she’s become an Other / way to talk about skin.” Williams pulls Lucy’s story into this world, examining both historical and contemporary problems of racism. This is a vital book, at once capable of searing insight and complex emotion. The poems speak to our time while giving voice to a ghost.” - Erica Wright Full review: https://chapter16.org/not-a-partridge-or-a-ruby/, From Cider Press Review: “As radical as the integration of Sally Hemmings’ descendants into Jefferson family reunions is Black Luce’s integration into the poetic ideals of the sonnet. There is more than cursing in Black Luce’s power. She manages to bless all her pan-African daughters. If “Lucy own her body/She run many other” as Williams reports, through Lucy, all young women of color embody the platonic ideal of Western Civilization’s finest love elegies. Through Williams’ reclamation of Shakespeare, African diasporic literature grows redolent with the possibility of being simply good literature without identity subdivisions, as worthy as Shakespeare, not other but Cleopatra to his Anthony, beloved for its narrative skill as Othello was to Desdemona, not separated, just elbow-to-elbow with the greats at the lunch counter, individual but never parenthetical. Buy this radical collection of poetry. Steal it if you must. Read it at all costs.” - Ann Babson Full review: http://ciderpressreview.com/reviews/a-welcome-bridge- lucy-negro-redux-by-carolyn-randall-williams-marches-on-shakespeare-for-black-southern-writers/#.WyAhxyMrKCg

Caroline Randall Williams is a multi-genre writer and and educator in Nashville Tennessee. She is co-author of the Phyllis Wheatley Award-winning young adult novel The Diary of B.B. Bright, and the NAACP Image Award-winning cookbook Soul Food Love. Named by Southern Living as “One of the 50 People changing the South,” the Cave Canem fellow has been published in multiple journals, essay collections and news outlets, including The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, CherryBombe and the New York Times. Her debut collection of poetry, Lucy Negro, Redux: The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet (Third Man Books, Spring 2019) is currently being turned into a ballet.