Andrea Stone

Scholar, teacher and poet, Andrea Stone’s work as an academic bleeds into her poetry. Her poems are ingenious hybrids of narrative and lyric, laced with the political and cultural histories that come up in her scholarly work. Stone’s debut story in verse, American Spelling, makes several trips across the Canada–U.S. border and blends politics with linguistics as it explores difficult emotional terrain, daring to surface the disconnects and dissonances found in the bond between a mother and child. Where the language of her poems involves, as she puts it, “syllables [that] involve the whole mouth,” the story she tells involves all our mental, emotional and linguistic faculties. 

American Spelling has been described by George Elliot Clarke, the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, as displaying “the desperate sentiments of Plath, but also the frustration and alienation of Eliot’s Prufrock,” and Clarke calls the book’s effortless lyricism “a beautiful, newborn twin to William Carlos Williams’s verse-novel, Paterson.” Stone’s novel-in-verse recounts the story of a daughter—who learns that she was dropped (as a very young child) from a bridge by her mother—and a mother, on the run and in isolation from her family and former life, tasked with understanding how she came to remove herself from motherhood.

Stone did not necessarily set out to write a book of poems; instead she found that American Spelling’s narrative resisted prose and fit most naturally into the compressed, emotionally charged medium of poetry: “I wanted to develop these characters and events, their narratives, but I wanted to do it in a way that would create the strongest images and feelings, and I wasn’t sure how to do it in prose,” Stone said in a 2016 interview with MassLive.com, “[i]t seemed to need the distillation of poetry, the concentration of language.” American Spelling’s child is like a “vowel/disavowed/dropped,” and her Canadian mother, in hiding across the border, adopts the “u”s from words like “colour” and “honour,” traditionally dropped from American usage.

Born in Toronto and raised in Dunnville, Ontario, Stone has published numerous essays, reviews and a chapbook, Tibetan for Bada Bing! (2011), with Michael Thurston. Stone’s creative work springs from academic work, both frequently addressing concerns about mental health, well-being, and cultural identity; “[M]y academic work informs my creative work very much,” Stone has said, “even if it’s not obvious.” Her other full-length book, Black Well Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature, was published by the University Press of Florida in 2016. Stone is an Associate Professor of English at Smith, where she teaches courses on the literatures of the African diaspora from the 18th century to the present. She is currently working on a book about black prison intellectuals in America.