Published in 2023
320 pages
Rebecca Gayle Howell is an award-winning writer, translator, and editor. Her Best Book of the Year honors include those from Best Translated Book Awards, Foreword Reviews INDIES Awards, The Banipal Prize, Ms. Magazine, Library Journal, Book Riot, and Poets & Writers. Among Howell’s awards are the United States Artists Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the Carson McCullers Fellowship, and two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of Alabama. She is the author of three poetry collections: Magic City Gospel, dark // thing, and REPARATIONS NOW! (on the longlist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargeant Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020, and she was a guest editor of POETRY magazine in 2021.
What is this book about?
What Things Cost: an anthology for the people is the first major anthology of labor writing in nearly a century. Here, editors Rebecca Gayle Howell & Ashley M. Jones bring together more than one hundred contemporary writers singing out from the corners of the 99 Percent, each telling their own truth of today’s economy.
In his final days, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a “multiracial coalition of the working poor.” King hoped this coalition would become the next civil rights movement but he was assassinated before he could see it emerge as the Poor People’s Campaign, now led by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. King’s last lesson―about the dangers of dividing working people―inspired the conversation gathered here by Jones and Howell.
Fifty-five years after the assassination of King, What Things Cost collects stories that are honest, provocative, and galvanizing, sharing the hidden costs of labor and laboring in the United States of America. Voices such as Sonia Sanchez, Faisal Mohyuddin, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Silas House, Sonia Guiñansaca, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Victoria Chang, Crystal Wilkinson, Gerald Stern, and Jericho Brown weave together the living stories of the campaign’s broad swath of supporters, creating a literary tapestry that depicts the struggle and solidarity behind the work of building a more just America.
