.Writers.on.Writing.
Get to know our authors, the foundation and heart of Yellow Arrow Journal, and what writing means to them through our monthly series.
.W.o.W. #81
Cherrie Woods (aka Cherrie Amour)
Describe an early experience where you learned that language has power.
It was in Toronto in the late ‘90s when a local poet, Dwayne Morgan, began to blow up as a poet with his Black conscious poetry. It was my first experience seeing a local poet become a celebrity.
What is a book you wish someone would write? That you want to write (or are writing).
A memoir about a double-woman immigrant from the Caribbean who fits in on the outside but feels awkward in two different countries—one that includes the pain and humor of not truly fitting in. Think of a book that combines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah with Issa Rae’s Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.
What does your inner writing voice tell you?
To keep working at my writing and take chances by submitting more.
What book is on the top of your to-be-read pile?
What Have We Here? by Billy Dee Williams (I met him at the Pratt Library after a lifetime of adoration).
Cherrie Woods (aka Cherrie Amour) is a Baltimore-based award-winning poet whose candid, narrative style is shared in her book, Free to Be Me: Poems on Love, Life, and Relationships. Her poems have been published in the Paterson Literary Review, Understorey Magazine, Poet’s Ink, The Fire Inside: Collected Poems and Stories from Zora’s Den, The Pen Woman, Maryland in Poetry, and America’s Future: Poetry & Prose in Response to Tomorrow. She is currently seeking publication for her new poetry manuscript, Sit Comfortably Elsewhere.
Yellow Arrow published Cherrie’s “Island Girl” in Yellow Arrow Journal kitalo, Vol. IX, No. 2, fall 2024 and “Kid Bamboo” in Yellow Arrow Vignette AMPLIFY. You can find Cherrie online at cherrieamour.com and on Instagram @cherrie_amour_thepoet and @cherriewoods and Facebook @cherrie.amour and @cherrie.woods.
Cherrie is teaching a virtual workshop at the Baltimore County Public Library called “Public Relations for Authors with Cherrie Woods” on February 10 (Tuesday) from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Learn more and register at events.bcpl.info/event/15509927.