Katie Hale is the author of a novel, My Name is Monster, and two poetry pamphlets. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, Munster Chapbook Prize, and Prole Laureate Competition. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Katie also runs Dove Cottage Young Poets for Wordsworth Grasmere, and is a Core Team Member of the Writing Squad. In 2022, she won the Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction for her second novel – and her debut poetry collection, White Ghosts, comes out with Nine Arches in March 2023.

In this engrossing Book Flood talk, Katie reads a selection of revealing, unflinching poems from White Ghosts. A work tracing maternal lines and difficult legacies of slavery and whiteness interwoven into the fabric of America. 

Content warning: contains strong language and references to slavery and gun violence.