Mummy Eaters is available from University of Nebraska Press, Amazon.
Longlisted for the National Book Award.
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, this collection Mummy Eaters follows in the footsteps of an imagined ancestor, one of the daughters of the house of Akhenaten in the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt. Walk this imagined path through the ancestor’s mummification and journey to the afterlife.
Through the work, the reverence for the human body as sacred matter and a pathway to eternal life is juxtaposed with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European fascination with ingesting Egyptian human remains as medicine and using exhumed Egyptian mummies as paper, paint, and fertilizer. Today Egyptian human remains are displayed in museums.
