The Spotlong Review is excited to continue working with Empowerment Avenue, a nonprofit organization that highlights the artistic and literary efforts by incarcerated people across the United States. This is The Spotlong Review’s second collaboration with Empowerment Avenue, and we look forward to featuring more work from incarcerated writers in upcoming issues. To learn more about Empowerment Avenue, and to support its mission, please visit the organization’s website.

We would like to give special thanks to Empowerment Avenue organizer Emily Nonko, who connected us with Demetrius Buckley and his outstanding poetry.

Read Demetrius’s featured poems below:

The Actors & the Awards

Contributors’ Notes

Near Kyiv

Bodies in Northern Africa

About Demetrius Buckley

My name is Demetrius Buckley. Writing has always been a playground for my imagination. It took me a few wrong turns to understand my calling and with those wrong turns I still ended in the beginning of my purpose, or direction of it. My reflection is to the people I desire communion with, to those upbringings unchosen to the child which dilutes the imagination with a speedy growth. it’s hard to dream while fighting at a young age. Without art we are nonexistent; without life we are nothing more but a rock waiting to be sand.

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Demetrius Buckley’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Michigan Quarterly Review, where he won the 2020 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets, Apogee, PEN America, and RHINO. He is the winner of the 2021 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize.

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Demetrius can be reached via JPAY, under the Michigan State Department of Corrections and ID number 449071.