An author, cultural connector, and poet whose work bridges diasporic worlds
Ehalakasa is pleased to welcome Karla Brundage as a jury member for SheShe Slam 2026, the fifth edition of our women led slam poetry platform dedicated to artistic excellence, cultural depth, and community rooted storytelling.
Karla Brundage is an award winning author, editor, teacher, and cultural practitioner whose expansive work spans continents, genres, and generations. She is most widely known for her prize winning poetry collection Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) which interrogates race, identity, history, and belonging with both intellectual rigor and lyrical force. Through her writing and public projects, she consistently invites readers and communities into difficult yet transformative conversations about how language, history, and power shape human lives.
But Brundage’s influence extends far beyond the page into the world of collaborative cultural exchange. She is the founder of the West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange, a visionary project that grew out of her long standing belief in poetry as a place of healing, connection, and mutual human recognition. Initially sparked during her years living and teaching abroad in Côte d’Ivoire, she partnered with local poets like Sir Black to imagine what a sustained creative dialogue between poets in the United States and West Africa might look like. Through weekly epistolary exchanges, workshops, and collaborative forms such as renshi, the project brought poets of diverse ages, identities, and backgrounds together to share work that culminated in international gatherings, published anthologies, and deep bonds across oceans.
These exchanges have produced several books and anthologies, including Our Spirits Carry Our Voices, Black Rootedness: 54 Poets from Africa to America, and Sisters Across Oceans the latter conceived as a collective conversation among women across the African diaspora that uses linked poetic forms to explore identity, resilience, and shared histories.
Karla’s vision is rooted in the idea that poetry is not simply performance or text, but a living practice something that lives in community gatherings, written exchanges, classrooms, festivals, and shared spaces of cultural belonging. She has taught internationally in Zimbabwe and West Africa, directed reading series, and curated anthologies that give space to voices too often marginalized in dominant literary spaces. Her work appears in a wide range of journals, magazines, and anthologies, and she has been recognized through Pushcart Prize nominations and features on radio and public literary platforms.
In Blood Lies: Race Trait(or), Brundage takes on the complexities of racial categorization, genealogical legacy, and personal narrative. Through rich poetic investigation, she unpacks terms like mulatto, octoroon, and quadroon not just as historical curiosities but as lived realities that shape personal identity and collective memory. Her book embodies an urgent intellectual curiosity one that embraces nuance without sacrificing emotional clarity.
What makes Karla’s contribution particularly valuable to SheShe Slam and the broader Ehalakasa community is her grounded approach to poetry as lived practice. She sees poetry as a tool for cultural reckoning, intergenerational dialogue, and global artistic solidarity not merely as entertainment or competitive sport. Her work is grounded in real communities, social history, and cultural continuity rather than abstraction or performance alone, making her presence on the jury both enriching and aligned with the ethos of SheShe Slam.
As SheShe Slam enters its fifth edition, Ehalakasa continues to prioritize jurors whose perspectives strengthen the integrity of the platform and support the growth of women poets beyond the stage and into lasting cultural influence.
We are honoured to welcome Karla Brundage into the SheShe Slam 2026 journey a testament to the power of poetry to heal, to connect, and to forge new cultural pathways.
