ABOUT THE GHOSTS OF MONTICELLO

Library of Virginia Literary Award Nominee • Winner, Stillhouse Press Poetry Prize

Recitatif: a shift in operatic singing towards the rhythms of speech, calling attention to a narrative interlude.

Carmen Gillespie’s The Ghosts of Monticello: A Recitatif interrupts the everyday to bring us the spiritual visitations of Sally Hemings, her half-sister Martha Wayles Jefferson, and other famed and forgotten residents of the Monticello plantation. These poems reach into the distant past to unearth songs of pain and longing, weighty with the long history of American silence that continues to circumscribe our lives today. Equal parts dirge and seance, this otherworldly walk through confines designed by the third president of the United States is an overdue re-envisioning of love, sex, and power at the roots of an incomplete democracy.

PRAISE FOR THE GHOSTS OF MONTICELLO

“The Ghosts of Monticello: A Recitatif  is a sonically mesmerizing, formally exploratory, lyrically innovative collection full of surprise, despair, tenderness, and complexity.”
— Caryl Page, author of Twice Told

“As the old saying suggests, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And one of the rhetorically brutal qualities of rhyme is that it shows us just how close virtue and idealism exist next to vice and savagery—in the same bed if not in the same body. Carmen Gillespie marshals rhyme, refrain, homonym, polyphony and counterpoint to create an ensemble performance that shines considerable light on the psychic tinderbox that was Jefferson's Monticello. The Ghosts of Monticello: A Recitatif is a necessarily haunted book for a helplessly haunted nation.”
—Kyle Dargan, author of Honest Engine and Logorrhea Dementia: A Self Diagnosis

“Carmen Gillespie's The Ghosts of Monticello is a testament to the fact that the past is never the past. It continues to throb beneath our present skin whether we want it to or not. This book is a wonderful skewering. This book gives voice to the lesser-known history of Monticello.”
—Charles Rafferty, author of The Smoke of Horses and The Unleashable Dog

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carmen Gillespie was a professor of English and director and founder of the Griot Institute for Africana Studies at Bucknell University. In addition to many individual scholarly articles and poem publications, she authored the literary critical works, A Critical Companion to Toni Morrison (2007), A Critical Companion to Alice Walker (2011), and edited Toni Morrison: Forty Years in the Clearing (2012). Carmen has also published a poetry chapbook, Lining the Rails (2008) and two poetry collections, Jonestown: A Vexation, which won the 2011 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize, and The Blue Black Wet of Wood (2016), winner of Two Sylvia’s Wilder Series Poetry Prize. The titular poem of the latter collection was selected by Motionpoems for development by Sundance award-winning director, Malik Vitthal, for production as a film short, which premiered at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in November of 2016.

Carmen’s awards include an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship for Excellence in Poetry and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was also a Cave Canem Fellow and a Fulbright scholar. Essence magazine named Carmen one of its 40 favorite poets in commemoration of the magazine’s 40th anniversary. The Ghosts of Monticello: A Recitatif was a semi-finalist of the 2016 University of Akron Poetry Prize and a finalist of the 2016 Cleveland State, Open Book Poetry Prize and the winner of the 2016 Stillhouse Press Poetry Contest.

Carmen passed away in Aug. 2019. She leaves behind two wondrous daughters, Chelsea Gillespie and Delaney Bakst, and a life’s work of beautiful poetry. Read our memoriam to Carmen’s life.