Emily Abendroth is a poet, teacher, and anti-prison activist living in Philadelphia, PA. She is the author of Sousveillance Pageant; the poetry collection ]Exclosures[ ; and The Instead, a book-length collaborative conversation with fiction writer Miranda Mellis. She has also released chapbooks with Albion Press, Belladonna, Little Red Leaves, TapRoot Editions, and Horse Less Press. She is a founding member of the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration, as well as LifeLines: Voices Against the Other Death Penalty Project.
Emily’s time at MacDowell provided her with the space and concentration to finally find an appropriately flexible and capacious shape, form, and approach for her newest book Sousveillance Pageant (Radiator Press, 2021). Sousveillance Pageant is a hybrid work that coasts restlessly between the categories of poetry, novel, and nonfiction essay. This book asks: What are those forms of recognition or ways of being seen that we as humans cannot live without, and what are those forms of recognition or ways of being seen that we cannot possibly live with (or which make life unsurvivable)? One inimitable encounter and discomfiting event after another pushes its characters to consider what constitutes security or safety, under what conditions, and for whom.
