Recipient of the 2021 Small Orange Emerging Woman Poet Honor

Sapless

My God, we leave things green

For a while

What I touch

Goes gold

Reaches up

Then withers

They say women scorch

My Earth has been quiet and dry

Always

Jasmine Respess is a Florida native who writes about the intersections of her Black, Southern, and Caribbean identities. At New College of Florida, she spent her undergrad career as a journalist, so she utilizes interviews of family members and research in much of her work. The tradition of magical realism has inspired her and she explores folktales and lore in her poems and non-fiction pieces. It is important for her to depict little Black girls playing in the woods too. She earned an MFA in Poetry from The New School, New York in 2020. She currently lives in Coral Gables, Florida with her two dogs and works as an Editor and Marketing Analyst at Mango Publishing Group.