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R. Flowers Rivera is a native of Mississippi with more than twenty years of teaching experience—who remains an educator and journey artist in both poetry and fiction. Her work has been anthologized in Mischief, Caprice & Other Poetic Strategies and published in journals such as African American Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Columbia, Feminist Studies, Obsidian, and The Southern Review.

Dr. Rivera’s short story, “The Iron Bars,” won the Peregrine Prize. She was also awarded the Leo Love Merit Scholarship in Poetry in association with the Taos Summer Writers Conference. She won the Texas Association of Authors award in poetry for her debut poetry collection Troubling Accents. She has been most recently named recipient of the prestigious Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award in addition to the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for her second collection, Heathen.Dr. Rivera now lives in Dallas proper.

FIELDS:

INTERESTS:

Banned Books and Censorship
Literary Novellas by Women
Contemporary Black Poets

CURATION:

Raq⭐: The Official Ratchet Auntie Playlist (3500+ songs rooted in Black music, history, and culture to serve another lens of intertextuality for Black literature—work songs and gospel to trap and ambient)

BOOKS:                     

Troubling Accents. Poetry collection, 110 pp. (July 2013, Xavier Review Press, Xavier University, New Orleans), winner of the Texas Association Award in Poetry 2014.

Heathen. Poetry collection,114 pp. (June 2015, Wayne State University Press, a Lotus Press imprint), winner of the 2015 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, winner of the 2016 Mississippi Institute of Art and Letters Award.

MANUSCRIPTS:     

Gaynette, Undaunted. Poetry collection (87 pp. manuscript under review: creative nonfiction documenting the life of my maternal grandmother, Gaynette Cox Flowers Pugh (b. 1916 in Grove Hill, AL – d. 2019 in Gulfport, MS.)  

Thus, It Happened. Novel, ca. 340 pp. (manuscript-in-progress)

Human Body, Human Mind, ca. 100 pp. (manuscript-in-progress). Short stories. 

HONORS AND AWARDS:

PUBLICATIONS:    

Anthologies:

Included in Mischief, Caprice & Other Poetic Strategies. Terry Wolverton, ed. (Red Hen Press).

Included in The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How To Make Your Poetry Swing. Keith Flynn, ed. (Writers Digest).

Fiction:

“A Trip.” Jabberwock Review 22:2 (2000) 72-87.

“Human Body, Human Mind.” Touchstone 32 (2000) 95-100.

“The Iron Bars.” Peregrine XVIII (1999) 12-17.