Abundance and Blessings!

We are deep into the new year already... but since this is my first post of 2013 - happy new year greetings! Wishing everyone abundance, blessings, and so much love!!! 

I brought in the new year at home and since getting back state side, I continue mapping out what I want to do and bring to fruition this year. So many seeds I've planted last year are coming to life and bearing fruit this year - especially my writing! And so I am thrilled to give all the details for my first solo book (a collection of my poetry and reproduction of my literary art work, myth memoir - Saltwater Healing) that is being published with Poinciana Paper Press - and the launch is this week Sunday! I am going home for the launch and also for the book binding this weekend. 

My book - "Saltwater Healing" will be a hand-bound, letterpress printed cover, limited-edition of 100 copies, and printed in full color. Thanks to the hard work of Sonia Farmer, editor and founder of the small independent press - Poinciana Paper Press, the book will be beautiful and a piece of art! Also, many thanks to both Sonia and Margot Bethel for collaborating and designing the cover. I feel incredibly blessed to be able to share my creative work and my story in this way. And I give thanks to this space of conscious vibration where I have shared so much of my work and my self over the years. 

In my tradition of archiving accomplishments and progress in my writing life, here are the highlights and details for the release of "Saltwater Healing":

Here is the official announcement from Poinciana Paper Press:

FEBRUARY 2013 "Saltwater Healing" by Angelique V. Nixon

Doongalik Studios

February 3, 3-5 p.m

Nassau, The Bahamas 

Poinciana Paper Press is pleased to announce the launch of "Saltwater Healing" by Bahamian poet, scholar and community worker Angelique V. Nixon. This myth memoir and poetry collection use the Bahamian landscape to explore difficult personal stories as a way to heal. 

My vision for this work grew out of the ways I engage with home as a Black mixed-race queer Bahamian woman living abroad. It grew out of troubled women's stories (herstories) too often left out of our "history" books. It grew out of messiness—the stuff we don't often speak about--poverty, domestic violence, drug abuse, disease, mental health, sexual trauma, sexuality, race and color, class and privilege, and environmental crisis. It grew out of my desire to speak and share hard stories through a visual medium, using a story-telling poetic form and collage of materials and found objects. And it grew out of my visits home over the years to reconnect with homespace, and this not only involved spending time with my loved ones, but also going to the sea, laying in sand, breathing in salty air, and soaking in the ocean’s healing embrace. It grew out of all the stories my grandmother told me as a young child - many which centered on the healing powers of our land and seascape. It grew out of me depending on my visits for rejuvenation, but also experiencing the difficult memories of my childhood. 

-Angelique V. Nixon

And for a sneak peek at Saltwater Healing and the process, check out photos on Poinciana Paper Press here!

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Here is the press release about "Saltwater Healing" written by Sonia Farmer - and featuring my responses to several of her questions inquiring about my process. This was published on Saturday in The Nassau Guardian, and I wanted to share it here as well. 

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Poinciana Paper Press launches “Saltwater Healing”

Published in The Nassau Guardian, Arts and Culture Section, 26 January 2013

Sonia Farmer, Poinciana Paper Press 

How do we tell the stories that are too painful to recall? In what language can we bring these hidden realities, often loaded with shame, to light and let the retelling hold witness to and ultimately heal our stories?

In “Saltwater Healing,” the latest book being launched next month by local independent fine press, Poinciana Paper Press, Bahamian poet Angelique V. Nixon finds the path to healing and empowerment lies in both language and image.

In eighteen snapshots, she collages photographs, drawings, and actual pieces from the Bahamian landscape—silk cotton tree cotton, woman’s tongue pods, sand and shells, dried leaves and seeds—and uses them alongside handwritten poetry to explore and understand difficult stories through the lens of the natural world.

Along with a selection of her own poems, the book finds beauty and strength in even the darkest of places—like letting the ocean’s tide wash your sorrow out to sea, “Saltwater Healing” moves the reader through to a refreshing and more inspired place.

“Through my collection, I hope readers feel inspired to tell their own stories in whatever ways that make sense to them. And I hope to encourage readers to share and speak their truth,” she says. “I am working in the tradition of Black women writers who insist upon our need to create our own stories out of what we know and what we don't know -- because so much of our histories/herstories are unknown.”

Inspired by Audre Lorde’s Zami, Angelique calls the work a “myth memoir” for its seamless combination of stories, experiences, memories, dreams and mystical elements in the narrative of poetry in the artwork, ultimately working to defy literary boundaries and create new ways of telling stories.

“I think it’s important for artists to cross and play with boundaries,” she says. “Poetry and writing generally help us to create images in our minds, and so I wanted to push myself as a word artist further into the visual realm.”

“Language is as fluid as other mediums of art, yet it is so often fixed in space,” she adds. “I love word art, mixed media, collage, recycled art, and photography. And so I found myself using a variety of objects to compliment and complicate my words and the stories I wanted to share.”

“Saltwater Healing” happened organically though a workshop and came to completion as she created an installation for last year’s Transforming Spaces art tour under the theme of “Fibre”. The powerful piece resisted any definitive literary genre, making it a perfect fit for the local independent press, Poinciana Paper Press.

“It's really important for my book to be published by this press because I believe in small independent publishing, and I want to support local businesses as much as I can in our economy,” says Nixon. “Also for me, its an honor to be published, recognized, and supported by a local Bahamian press because my work is about home - and no matter how long I have lived away - The Bahamas is always my home.”

Specializing making Caribbean stories into limited-edition and hand-made works of art, Poinciana Paper Press recognizes that the book form is an active part of the reading experience. Founded in 2007 by Sonia Farmer, the press was a nomad entity for several years while she completed her training in book-binding, printmaking, papermaking and letterpress printing abroad in New York City and London, the U.K. In 2012, Poinciana Paper Press finally gained a home in Nassau and is presently growing into a center for book arts, letterpress and papermaking—the first of its kind in the Caribbean.

Angelique V. Nixon is a writer, scholar, teacher, community worker, and poet born and raised in The Bahamas. She earned her Ph.D. in English specializing in Caribbean literature and culture at the University of Florida in 2008. Currently, she is a professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania.

“Saltwater Healing” is hand bound with a letterpress-printed cover in a limited edition of one hundred copies, which will be available for purchase at the launch on February 3^rd, 3 p.m. at Doongalik Studios on Village Road. Angelique will read from her collection and guests will be able to see the original panels of “Saltwater Healing” on display in the gallery space.

For more about Poinciana Paper Press, visit www.poincianapaperpress.blogspot.com. 

Invite for the launch in Nassau, The Bahamas! 

I hope to also have a launch in New York sometime this Spring - so for all my NY peeps, look out for details soon! And also for my friends/family outside of Nassau, let me know if you want your very own copy of "Saltwater Healing" - and I can make arrangements with you! 

Email me at angeliquevnixon@gmail.com for more info!

with peace, light & conscious wibes dem,
Angelique