Victoria Newton Ford is a poet and essayist from Memphis, Tennessee. Her writing explores fungibility, violence, haunting, and intimacy. She has received support from Crosstown Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, TORCH Literary Arts, MacDowell, and more. Victoria is an inaugural 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow, administered by Haymarket Books. She is currently working on her first manuscript and documentary, which examine slavery as an ever-present haunting in the lives of Black mothers and their children.
While at MWC, Victoria will work on poems and essays exploring her family’s connection to a 19th century abolitionist plantation in Memphis, known as Nashoba. This manuscript maps the narrative of her mother’s captivity onto a longer, recursive narrative of Blackness, sexual violence, and Southern haunting that has never fully ended.