Meet MCPF’s 2020 Eco-Poet, Salaam Green

We love and admire Salaam Green as a voice for poetry, activism, and social justice in Birmingham and the state of Alabama at large. Salaam Green is Master Healer, Born and Breed in the Black Belt of Alabama. M.S. Early Childhood Education. Southern Essayist/Freelance Writer and Poet, founder of Literary Healing Arts & Red Couch Writers, Rural Organizer with Black Belt Citizens, University of Alabama at Birmingham Arts in Medicine Artist in Resident for Creative Writing and Poetry and a Deep South Storyteller for Creatively Aging, 2016 Poet Laureate for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. 2018 Tedx Birmingham Speaker. Here is a brief biography of Salaam in her own words…

Thoughts on her role as Executive Director of Literary Healing Arts Foundation and Services:

“The mission of the Literary Healing Arts Foundation and Services is to promote the healing power of words through literary art devices and techniques i.e. poetry, writing, storytelling, journaling, and symbols….the list goes on and on. Its mission is to formulate community around anyone and everyone that has experienced any type of suffering. We want to create safe spaces, opportunities, and outlets for all to write, heal, express pain, disappointment, grief, sadness, and the like on paper. We want to harness the poet/author that has always lived inside. To provide individual and group services for recovery, restoration, and renewal; sometimes we need to re-start, re-frame, and build again. Though I am not a counselor and my services are not meant to replace therapy, they are empowerment and creativity communal practices for holistic healing and support. I give the tools and the motivation that empowers all to do this through what they already have their words and the ability to put pen to paper and tell their story like no ones business. I am in the business of healing thorough the only form that I know; which has been a force in my own healing process; words and writing.” (Source)

On winning the EDPA poetry contest with her poem “Where the World Comes to Create,” and what inspired that poem:

“Inspiration is fleeting; I rather say my imagination that never settles often leads me to what I guess others call poetry or writing. Alabama Where the World Comes to create is not my poem, Alabama wrote it for me to gift back to her. It’s the essence of Alabama’s Poetry that I see in the lives, loves, and hands of those who craft in this state amidst suffering, trials, injustice, and growth. One of my favorite poems/pieces of literary art is the play Everyman, a 14th century medieval allegory – my favorite period of literature. There is a line where Everyman asks and this is paraphrased, “will your soul not comfort me if I speak?” That resonated with me the first time I read it. Creatives and innovators in Alabama and those to come do the comforting as Alabama speaks whether its through rural campaigns to build green housing for low income citizens, selling garden fresh goods from farm stand markets, or framing a steel building in downtown Birmingham for children and families. My favorite stanza of Alabama where the world comes to create: is the first line with idioms I hope we in this sweet state of Alabama never come to forget.

From the carved hands of George Washington Carver
Come bandwidths of steam that soak into the depths of southerners
Launching high resolution dreams
Selma to Montgomery world changers posit fertile ideas that built the richness of invention into the marbled stains of its noteworthy history,
into the blue grass fields of craftsmanship
From the coal caves of Bibb County across
The wind piped sands of Mobile Bay
Yes-Alabama is where the world comes to create”

Excerpted from her poem, “Hymn of Brown Daughters” (first published in Glass Poetry Press):

Yearning to breathe free,
loosening the noose
of white guilt,
protesting patriarchy,
waving the red, white, and blue stars and stripes,
standing in the kitchen of thieves holding a charity plate.
Hot cooking grease burns in an unseasoned cast iron pan
next to a bubbling, boiling pot of crowded collard greens.
Unprotected ancestors’ American Dreams steam
on the contrite stove of gas lighters —
origins of people not commonly given a seat at the table of equal rights.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me:
you and me, we both yearning to breathe free.
When the sheet music dreadfully harmonizes the stanza
that becomes a keening song,
the slave owner who becomes his own slave
taking a last lashed breath,
hearing no sound, because there is no sound
left to hear.