Arts Directory

About

Marlanda Dekine offers a power carried through poetry, conversation, written word, and spoken word. Poetry readings, performances, and workshops are complete with engaging interaction. Marlanda Dekine is a poet, a voice, and a presence who makes uplifting connections through poetry and workshop facilitation. Their collection of poems, Thresh & Hold, won the 2021 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize at Hub City Press, judged by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Dekine is also the creator of “SOUL: An Ancestor Workshop”, “i am from a punch & a kiss”, a multimedia book/mixtape project, and the founder of Speaking Down Barriers, a nonprofit working towards equity and justice. They are the 2023 Spoken Word/Poetry Slam Fellow for South Carolina, the 2021 Castle of Our Skins Shirley Graham Du Bois Creative-in-Residence, a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, Tin House Own Path Scholar, Emrys Scholar, and a Watering Hole Fellow. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Orion Magazine, Oxford American, POETRY, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Governor’s Award from SC Humanities, their work is obsessed with ancestry, memory, & the process of staying within one’s own body, leaving spells & incantations for others to follow for themselves.