‘Room Swept Home’ by ODU’s Remica Bingham-Risher Wins Los Angeles Times Book Prize Award for Poetry

By Joy Vann

The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry was awarded to “Room Swept Home,” a collection of poems by Remica Bingham-Risher ’01, Old Dominion 91����Ƶ’s director of quality enhancement plan initiatives, in April. It also received the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award for Best Poetry Honor Book and was short-listed for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection.

Bingham-Risher is a prolific writer having published consistently for the past 20 years. Her other books include the memoir “Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up,” “What We Ask of Flesh” and “Starlight & Error.”

“Room Swept Home,” more 15 years in the making, was purchased in a bidding war in an auction by Wesleyan Press, a small university publisher known for poetry.

Bingham-Risher’s office in Dragas Hall overlooks ODU’s quad, directly facing the Perry Honors College inside Monarch Hall, which was a pivotal place in her life. She was the president of the Honors College during her undergraduate studies when she was a “baby poet” studying creative writing under former ODU professor and poet laureate of Virginia Tim Seibles.

When asked about that view, she said, “Looking out at the Honors College building across the mall really, truly reminds me what a journey it has been since entering ODU as a first generation 18-year-old back in 1999,” she said. “I found my place and joy here, found parts of my voice, and now I get to help others find their voices as well.”

“Room Swept Home” tells the stories of two women, her paternal great-great-great grandmother Minnie Lee Fowlkes who was enslaved, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight whose post-partum depression led to hospitalization at the Central Lunatic Asylum for the Negro Insane in Petersburg. That’s where the paths of the two women crossed in 1941. Neither knew that four decades in the future, their shared progeny would link them in a work of art that’s like a family heirloom.

The book is dedicated to Bingham-Risher’s grandmother, Shirley Bingham, who provided its impetus when she asked her granddaughter if she had ever read the newspaper article about her grandmother. When Bingham-Risher read the “article” she realized it was a slave narrative produced during the Depression by the Works Progress Administration. She had read many of them as an African American Studies minor at ODU.

“In fact, I had read Minnie Fowlke’s narrative because it's anthologized all over the place, but I had no idea she was a relative,” she said. “It’s a long, really heartbreaking account of her mother dealing with enslavement until emancipation.”

In the narrative, Fowlkes, told her interviewer, “I just know if I knowed how to write, and had a little learning I could put off a book on this here situation.” Little did she know a granddaughter would resurrect her to do just that.

After reading that narrative, Bingham-Risher took on the calling of poet as family historian.

As she writes in the two-page essay at the beginning of the book: “The poet’s job (i.e., the post as historian, as opposed to the other undertakings such as poet as soothsayer, poet as family arbiter, poet as line dancer and the like) is to make the dead become the living.”

The author, as a researcher and writer, was impelled to get the facts about her other grandmother, Mary Knight, first-hand. However, because of federal privacy laws concerning medical records, she had to wait until the 75-year open release mark was met. 

So, it wasn’t until June of 2016 that Bingham-Risher, with her ODU writer friends Princess Perry and Matilda Cox, visited the Library of Virginia in Richmond to find out what the archives held.

She pulled the ledgers, turned a few pages and found her grandmother’s name, admitted into the infamous mental institution at the age of 18, shortly following the birth of her first child. With her grandmother’s records in hand, she learned what she could, notably that the asylum was just one mile from Minnie Fowlkes’ house.

Bingham-Risher then began to weave her grandmother’s stories together. Through persona poems written in their voices, she told their stories of enslavement, dancing in the kitchen, birthing babies, working in the fields and family.

The book is interspersed with black and white photographs evocative of family life and of a past Virginia with Jim Crow-era signs, women processing tobacco at the turn of the century, volumes of the “Virginia Slave Births Index,” a coal miner with his family and the author at 4 years old in her Sunday best.

“You are trying to kind of rewrite and fill in the spaces of history. For Black women in particular, there's a lot of historical erasure,” she said. “Even in the archives, there's not a whole lot. Even if you're looking at, sadly enough, slave indices, it'll often say the master's name and rarely an enslaved man’s name.’”

In addition to following an outline that provided historical context to the poems, Bingham-Risher used her imagination to fill in the gaps.

“I wanted to make sure that they had full, well-developed lives. And aside from all of that, my regular process as a writer is, it takes a long time, because I'm a strident revisionist. Each poem goes through about 30 revisions,” she said. “It's supposed to look like magic on the page, but really, it's a whole lot of doing everything you can to make it as clear as possible.”

She thanks God for the ability to write the book and the host of librarians and archivists who assisted her with research. She said the book is a labor of love.

“This is the only book I cried my way through. I would laugh at myself in my office and say, ‘You're not supposed to cry at your own poems.’ I'm a firm believer that we hold on to much of the trauma. Science tells us that folks who are three and four generations removed from the Holocaust and are still holding on to much of that trauma because it's now in the blood,” she said.

“. . . You start seeing traits that are much like yourself in these folks, and you think, oh my goodness, that’s the reason that I'm a giver, or that’s why I'm so hard-headed, or that the reason I love being on the water is because these women put it into my blood.”

After putting “Room Swept Home” to bed last year, Bingham-Risher began working on a novel that she’ll wrap up at the end of the summer.

She said her extended family, formerly weary of her exposing the kinds of things that were usually only whispered about, has come around.

“When you start becoming a writer, people are like, ‘Oh, she's telling everybody's business.’ They get a little upset. But around book three, they realized, ‘Oh, she is the keeper of the stories,’" she said. “And so now they say, ‘Hey, wait, don't tell that story yet. Remica, come in here. You got your notebook? Write this down,’ because they want to make sure that we don't lose it."