MORE ABOUT TZYNYA PINCHBACK
"How to make cornbread dressing when the world is in quarantine" is a prose poem that uses the recipe format for its container. The narrator of the poem is dictating their mother's family recipe for cornbread dressing to a younger brother from long distance the first year of Covid-19 when families were urged to avoid gathering. Scenes from their childhood and cooking instructions are braided throughout.
Tzynya Pinchback writes the Black woman body in nature, illness, and joy as a deliberate act. She is a 2024 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow, the 2025 Writing the Land poet-in-residence for D.W. Field Park in Brockton, MA, and has received fellowships and residencies from Roots.Wounds.Words, and Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA) Foundation. Her chapbook, How to make pink confetti, was selected for the Dancing Girl Press reading series for women poets. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Lily Poetry Review, Mom Egg Review, Nixes Mate Review, and others. Tzynya is currently at work on a cancer memoir-as-case-study that maps her chronic illness to the five social determinants of health. A California native, Tzynya lives in an impossibly small cottage on a pond in Massachusetts where she is surviving cancer and New England winters.