Loyalty is delighted to host Jennifer Huang, Jeni De La O, and Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie for Return Flight! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event with a donation of any amount of your choice or you can order the book on our website to be added to the event's registration list. Donations will go to BLM DC. There will also be an option to snag the book during the event.

Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire--and with the many tendons in between.

When Return Flight asks "what name / do you crown yourself," Huang answers with many. Textured with mountains--a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self--and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Jennifer Huang's poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a "myth a mess of myself." Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold.

Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of "beating hearts / through objects passed down," the poems travel through generations--among Taiwan, China, and America--cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather's smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child's bowl, a slap felt decades later--the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past.

Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean "purple" and "blue" as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by " keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends."

Jennifer Huang is the author of Return Flight, which was awarded the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions. Their poems have appeared in POETRY, The Rumpus, and Narrative Magazine, among other places; and they have been received recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Brooklyn Poets, North American Taiwan Studies Association, and more. In 2020, Jennifer earned their M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program. Born in Maryland to Taiwanese immigrants, they have since called many places home.

Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie is a Zambian-Ghanaian poet who grew up in Botswana. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. She is the author of Born in a Second Language, winner of Button Poetry's Chapbook Contest. She is also a winner of a Hopwood and a Meader Family Award. She is a finalist of Narrative’s 12th Annual Poetry Prize, The Brunel International African Poetry Prize, The Furious Flower Poetry Prize and Wick Poetry Center's Peace Poem Contest, among others. Akosua has received fellowships from Tin House, the Helen Zell Writers' Program, Callaloo and the Watering Hole. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Pank, Kweli, Obsidian, and Wildness.

Jeni De La O is a poet and storyteller living in Detroit. She is a 2021 Kresge Arts Fellow and a founding member of The Estuary Collective. Jeni writes the column BROWN STUDY for The Poetry Question. Her collection, SOFIAS, won the Tiran Burrell Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming from Knights Library in September of 2022.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Jennifer Huang, Jeni De La O, and Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie for RETURN FLIGHT