Ann Arbor Poetry: Zaphra Stupple and Native Child

Zaphra Stupple is a poet and multimedia artist living in Michigan. They are the author of There Will Still Be The Body (Red Beard Press, 2018). They were the 2017 Ann Arbor youth poet laureate. They were featured in Ann Arbor’s annual poetry show, Poetry Night, and are one third of the accompanying book, Joy, Despite. Their work has been published in The Offing, HEArt Journal, |tap| magazine, The Journal, and Vinyl, among others.

Kelly “Native Child” Mays is a licensed therapist, word warrior, award winning poet, annishnabe kwe, mother, wife, survivor. She incorporates poetry into her activism, therapy, and into her everyday life. A Detroit native, she is proud of both her American Indigenous ancestry and her African American Ancestry. She competed at the National Poetry Slam 2017 in Denver, CO, and in 2018. She was winner of the 2017 Round Robin Motown Mic and a 2018 and 2019 Motown Spoken Word Artist if the year finalist. She was featured in Cathexis Northwest Press in their September 2018 online journal. In 2019 she ranked 17 overall in the Rustbelt Regional Poetry competition out of 80 poets. She describes her poetry as quiet storms and her daughters as her greatest poems ever written.