Lines of Legacy
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photo by shane darby
Poet and professor dr. brittny ray crowell’s debut book, Cord Swell, honors generations of Texarkana residents
By Ellen Orr
A published poet and professor at Clark Atlanta University, brittny ray crowell grew up in and around Texarkana, Texas, as the youngest in a four-generation home.
“For the first five years of my life, we stayed in a trailer out behind my grandparents’ house in Macedonia, and my great-grandmother was there, too,” she said. Her great-grandmother, Frankie “Big Mama” Greenwood, passed when brittny was 8; she commemorated the event with a poem:
“That elegy may have been the very first poem [I ever wrote],” she recalled.
That poem, written over 30 years ago, features in brittny’s debut book of poetry, Cord Swell, which was published in 2025 by W. W. Norton & Company. The entire collection is a memorialization of her ancestors, crafted in part from historical documents such as journals and obituaries. Interspersed throughout the book are archival collages: photographs and original handwritten documents layered with intention. In her poems and collages alike, brittny craftfully records her family history and invites new imaginings.
“Writing about my folks is really important to me,” she said. “I always say that this book is a work of extending elegy beyond lament; grief can only go so far, and so I try to think of different ways to make connections to people that I love and hang onto the kite string. I [ask my predecessors], ‘How can I show you that I still love you in every dimension of where you may be?’”
brittny attended TISD elementary schools and graduated from Texas High School in 2003. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Spelman College and then won a Fulbright, which allowed her to teach English in Thailand for a semester. She applied to graduate programs for creative writing and was rejected. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she said, “so I came back home.”
Though returning to Texas was emotionally difficult, brittny emphasized that “it wasn’t anything about Texarkana, period; it was that the plans I’d made were not unfolding. But, you know, God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and it was what needed to happen.” She began teaching at Texas High, alongside many of her former teachers, whom she adored and described as “the greatest English teachers.”
brittny and Kenneth Crowell have two children, Iris and Lotus. submitted photo
brittny honed her teaching craft at the high-school level for 10 years, which she said has benefited her greatly in her current role as assistant professor at CAU. “I’m so grateful because teaching high school made me so much better as a professor,” she said. “Most professors don’t get that type of training in discipline or organization. You can be an expert and smart and still be a horrible teacher.”
Though she grew up determined to be a writer and not a teacher, brittny said that, in hindsight, everything worked out exactly as it should have.
“I believe a lot in the inheritance of certain skills,” she said. “I come from a long line of teachers: my grandfather, my aunt, and my great-grandmother were teachers, and my great-great-grandfather, Paul Matthis, even started a school in Jefferson [the Macedonia Rural School]. So it kind of was in me, but I just didn’t see myself as a teacher—maybe because of society and what we all perceive teachers to be—because we don’t get the respect that we deserve. Maybe it wasn’t even that. I just think that I had in my head [that I wanted to be a] ‘writer,’ and that meant something in a certain way for me. I just didn’t have the good sense to know that writing is teaching, and that teaching makes you a better learner of the craft.”
“I want Texarkana folks to know that story is important, and it’s a part of our inheritance to pass stories on—and poetry is a way of doing that.”
While teaching in Texarkana, brittny wrote for Four States Living Magazine, a gig that “made me feel like I was still a writer,” she said, despite a hiatus from writing fiction and poetry. She also pursued an MA in English from Texas A&M University–Texarkana, studying under Dr. Doug Julien and Dr. Corinne Hinton—“these great people who were really progressive,” she said. “I think that sometimes people think that Texarkana is very slow to change, and that’s true to some degree, but there are a lot of people here who welcome progress and innovation, and they were that for me.”
In 2017, brittny moved with her husband, Kenny, and their then–4-year-old daughter, Iris, to Houston, where brittny began her PhD at the University of Houston. In 2021, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, she gave birth to their second child, Lotus. “When I had to take my oral exams, I didn’t have a sitter, so I had to nurse her while I gave my oral comps virtually,” she recalled.
In 2023, brittny moved back to Atlanta to accept a poetry professorship. “It’s been beautiful being back in the [Atlanta University Center Consortium, a collaboration of four HCBUs],” she said. “I remember walking on Spelman’s campus [as an undergraduate] and just being like, ‘I cannot believe I’m here, this is so special’—and I feel that way every day I walk on campus.”
Still, brittny said that, while she intends to remain at CAU for many years to come, the city of Atlanta does not feel like home to her. “Atlanta is great for people who want a big city—and I thought that I wanted to be in a big city when I was younger,” she said. “I have never found another place like Texarkana, that feels like that in my heart.
brittny held her first book signing at the Decatur Book Festival in 2025. submitted photo
“Atlanta is so far [from Texarkana]—I can’t just drop in, and that’s difficult for me. I still listen to the radio station here, and I check the weather here every day,” she continued, with tears in her eyes. “There’s nothing like the navel of your existence.” She said that she and her husband talk about the possibility of retiring here one day.
In the meantime, brittny will remain connected to this area, not only by making the 10-hour drive to visit but also by continuing to center much of her literary work on Texarkana. Among other ventures, she is pursuing a project about Carver Terrace, which was once a flourishing, predominantly Black neighborhood and is now an EPA Superfund site.
“I’m really interested in writing about what it meant for these Black people to have been placed in this [development] that they thought was a paradise for them, and to have that totally ripped up from under them,” she said. “[I’m also interested in] the toxicity of that environmental racism, but also how people survive that toxicity.”
Through physical relocation and her work as a poet, brittny has again and again returned to the sites of her past—and to her hometown of Texarkana in particular. She invoked the concept of sankofa, a Ghanaian word meaning “to go back and get”; it is found in a common proverb, translated as, “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.” brittny intends for her ancestors, and for the people of this region, never to be truly forgotten.
Pictured here with students from her “Hip-Hop as Religion” course in 2023, brittny is entering her fourth year as an assistant professor at Clark Atlanta University. submitted photo
“I think of the altar work that is poetry for me—like, I feel like I’m doing the work of making sure [ancestors] are alive,” she said. “There’s [a saying] about how you only die when the last person says your name—and I’m like, ‘Not gonna happen,’ because even after I’m gone, this book is here, and people can read it.
“I want Texarkana folks to know that story is important,” brittny continued, “and it’s a part of our inheritance to pass stories on—and poetry is a way of doing that.”