​RECIPIENT
​REFLECTION

Mentorship Recipient:
​​Inheritence

Mentor Commentary:
Ali McClain​

On the Revision Process for "Inheritance"

 by ​​Ijeoma Umebinyuo

I loved the mentorship with Ali McCain. I worked with the feedback and the exchange between Ali and I was smooth, how Ali wanted to understand the “why” of the poem which is the heart of the poem. As my poem is as much cultural and womanist poem, I made it known why I was writing with such a POV. I worked on slowing the poem down, using “silence” and “pouch” as the words that carried and visualized the poem while adhering to working on the poem by dividing the stanza to slow the poem down, making sure the description stuck by adding the right punctuation which created a pause. I enjoyed seeing the poem as a reader and then as a writer as we went back and forth with slight changes and suggestions. The revised work feels more polished, finished and ready without losing any part of my voice. It was worth it not just to get my poem published but to work on a more polished version of my poem without losing my narrative voice.

Photo by ​Oluwayemisi Olorunwunmi

Ijeoma Umebinyuo
​
Ijeoma Umebinyuo was born in Lagos, Nigeria but her ancestral home sits between two states, a border town somewhere in Southeastern Nigeria. Her short stories and poems have appeared in The Stockholm Review of Literature, The Wildness, The Rising Phoenix Review, Doll Hospital Journal, The Renaissance Noire, and The MacGuffin. Her poem “Diaspora Blues” is a part of Dr. Rosalba Icaza’s contribution to Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics. She speaks on “Dismantling the Culture of Silence” in her TEDx talk. Her poem “The Delicate Acts of Survival” from her poetry collection Questions for Ada has been selected to be translated into Spanish; it will be published by Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencas Sociales (Latin American Council of Social Sciences) as an ebook.

Photo: Oluwayemisi Olorunwunmi