In Her Skin....

Evie Shockley is an African American professor and poet. She writes not only to entertain but to inform her readers about the racial discrimination that she and other African American's face on a day to day basis. Also, she is not afraid to go back in time and renovate ideas from other African American poets in the past like Maya Angelou, and my partner Joey's author, Gwendolyn Brooks. These two ladies are just a few poets that Evie Shockley's shadows under.  She like many other African American poets have made work to bring some issues that lie within the black community like low academic success, drug activity, lack of determination and consistency at work and low self-esteem for black women and black men. By bringing awareness to these issues Shockley desires the black community to see how this is such a hindrance for growth and development and that the only way to change these issues is to address them and come together and help one another. In addition many of her poems are geared towards black women in America. She wants to bring attention to black women as a black woman herself, the self-esteem epidemic that many black women have sadly experienced. The feeling of never being enough pretty enough, with nappy, coarse hair texture, and darker shaded skin color and such are constant reminders and comparing factors they have to fight in a society that praises and idolizes and advertise lighter tone black women, with long, straight hair. These obstacles that she expresses in her poems are first hand experiences that she has had and she shares this with her audience to bring awareness to this situation to show black women that they should appreciate themselves the best that they can without having to feel like they must compare themselves to the idea of beauty in our society. Some of her writings are titled,

Here is a my Partner Joey's website
http://joeyspoetryblog.weebly.com/

Here is a link to a mini bio of Evie Shockley
http://redroom.com/member/evie-shockley/bio

Some of her Works are titled
"A Half-Red Sea"

&


"The New Black"

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The New Black