Kamilah Aisha Moon

In shock and grief, the Hobart Festival of Women Writers Planning Committee offers our deep condolences to the family, friends, and colleagues of Kamilah Aisha Moon, who died last week.

Kamilah was a Participating Writer at the 2016 Festival. Needless to say, she stunned us with her poetry, its elegance and brilliance. She happily told us then she would be starting that fall as an Assistant Professor of English at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga. Just as happily, we congratulated her, wished her well, and made her promise to return to Hobart from Decatur, though not so near as New York City. Kamilah was such a lovely presence, an empathic poet, full of light and grace. She will be missed in the world of poetry, in the world of women, in the world.

Ending this tribute with a passage from her praise poem, “Catskills Retreat,”* seems fitting:

                           I take cool, high altitude breaths

                           & recall other heights, gaze

                           at humbling shoulders of earth

                           brushing up against brazen blue—

                           channel a lily pad lightness upon

                           woman-made depths to face matters

                           long past skimming . . .

                           . . .  bless my fellow travelers & the blades

                           of grass forgiving our steps, springing

                           back up. Bless the beaver beginning

                           again and again, the monarch’s 

                           meandering flight. Bless these mosquitoes

                           & their insatiable thirst, the bluejays

                           at dawn trilling you are not through

*Starshine and Clay, Four Way Books/Tribeca, ‘17.