By Kimberly Dixon [Bio]
Kimberly Dixon is a poet, playwright and performer. She holds a B.A. Psychology/Theater Studies from Yale University an M.A. in Afro-American Studies (playwriting concentration) from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Theatre/Drama from Northwestern University. A Cave Canem and Ragdale fellow, she has published in journals including The Drunken Boat, Torch, Versal, Reverie, in the anthology Just Like a Girl: A Manifesta! from GirlChild Press, and she released her first poetry collection, SenseMemory, with Blue Pantry Publishers. As a playwright, she has received readings and staged productions at Crossroads Theatre Company, Plowshares Theatre Company, and Strawdog Theatre Company, and her comic play “The Gizzard of Brownsville” was a finalist for the Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwrights. From 2004-2010 she was a writer/performer with the Poetry Performance Incubator project of the Guild Literary Complex. She then became Executive Director of the Guild Literary Complex in 2010, producing the Incubator, the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards, and several other literary events and programs around Chicago. She has also worked and volunteered for more than ten years in marketing, brand strategy and audience research and development.
I.
Beloved for the way it rides the drive
takes fingertip to city’s curving spine;
tracks ribboned marker giving sense of place
route in or out with ease facilitates
Assuring for the way it hugs the Shore
to unfamiliars coming from the North
or South, that matter, place of skeptics too
Hyde Park the neighbor everybody knew.
II.
If North Shore is the crown atop the spine
then South Side gives too many low-back pain.
but base of spine is also start of hips
that curve with promise, charm and mystery.
Hyde Park is belt of jewelry round that waist
its gems a wealth our city shows with pride
while draping South Side legs in shrouded skirts
as if to trick a suitor, hide some shame –
the scars and bruises of a labored life –
as if those legs were atrophied, not strong
enough for hips that birth new bloodlines on,
enough to push to crown my sense of home.
