When you look up
rape survivor is always
nestled nearby we are supposed
to have achieved another side
Read the full poem "On Not Surviving" at Verse Daily and get your copy of Smoke Girl.
Smoke Girl is a study in loss: of body, safety, and identity. It interrogates the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility of fat, Black, femme bodies. Instead of forgetting, Simone Person breaks the silences and shame embedded in the murky aftermath of sexual assault, employing the voices of victim, perpetrator, and spectator throughout.
Simone Person is a 2018 Pink Door Women’s Writing Retreat fellow and became the Fiction Editor at Honeysuckle Press in 2019. She is the author of Dislocate, the fiction winner of the 2017 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest, and Smoke Girl, the poetry winner of the 2018 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest. Simone grew up in Michigan and Toledo, Ohio and is a dual MFA/MA in Fiction and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She can be found at simoneperson.com and on Twitter and Instagram at @princxporkchop.
