By Erin Wood
If you’ve attended Wednesday Night Poetry in Hot Springs—the longest running consecutive weekly poetry open mic in the country—you may have felt the energy in the room shift as poet and textile artist Crystal C. Mercer took the mic.
Mercer’s words charge and calm, command action and offer embrace. Her hand-stitched textiles reveal what it means to weave oneself into a fabric story one stitch, one hour at a time. Behold as she fuses arts and activism, using theatre and textiles to tell social justice narratives.
At the 2019 Arkansas Black Hall of Fame, she stirred a packed house to thundering applause as her voice rang with her original poem: “. . . you walked before us/Gathered your Black children/And placed us on your shoulders/So we could see further/And dream bigger/What an incredible view . . .”
Mercer’s book, A Love Story Waiting to Happen (Butterfly Typeface, 2019), is available from local and national retailers, and she is currently reading from her latest collection, Riot, which she hopes to publish this year.
About her current work, Mercer shares, “Riot is steeped deeply in my roots as a daughter of social justice and the daily assault on my body as a Black woman. Each poem is a war cry of liberation as I seek to dismantle standards and systems that attempt to break me.
“In the spirit of liberation, From Cotton to Silk: The Magic of Black Hair [Et Alia Press, fall 2020] is a positive response to encourage my nieces to recognize and appreciate their natural, cultural beauty. I am mapping out a Poet Road Show with my fellow sister-poet-friend, Essmorra. I’m also producing a mini-doc on my experience reciting my original poem at the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame and a poetry EP, both titled Black Glow Matters.”
A Hot Springs native, Erin Wood is a writer, editor, and publisher in Little Rock. She owns and runs Et Alia Press (etaliapress.com). Wood is author of Women Make Arkansas: Conversations With 50 Creatives (April, 2019) and editor of and a contributor to Scars: An Anthology (2015).
