I first met Tyra Jamison on a playground.
It was years ago (4, maybe?), mid-June, about an hour before one of the annual installments of the Kidchella Family Music Festivals at Smith Memorial in Philadelphia. I'm the music curator for the beloved series, she was interning at The Smith that summer while at university. We chatted only briefly but I remember that we talk about writing, poetry, and spoken word. She wrote and performed and I immediately followed her on Instagram. I tucked those small conversations away, hoping I might have the opportunity to work with her somewhere, somehow down the line. And then I started Stanchion. And then I remembered Tyra.
I reached out to my colleagues at The Smith last July, during a summer without the music festival due to COVID, to tell them about this new project of mine and ask them to kindly put me in touch with Tyra to see if she'd submit a piece of her poetry to Stanchion.
What I received was a trio of poems and one marvelous short story. The latter would appear in issue two. "Back To The Underground" was Tyra's published fiction debut. One of those three poems begins issue three. You'll see those pieces on the pages of Stanchion but you won't see the name Tyra Jamison. What you see instead is Mant¿s.
While I didn't ask Tyra about the origins of it, it's helpful for you to know what Mant¿s is and means. In a recent interview with Boston Accent Lit, Tyra explains the Mant¿s pseudonym by saying it's, "Definitely a shoutout to Marvel’s Mantis, a superhero whose main powers are empathy, healing, and astral projection. It’s also a really tongue-in-cheek reference to misandry (seeing that a female praying mantis *decapitates* her male sex partners).
I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to publish two Mant¿s original works and grateful to know Tyra Jamison.
Now, let's learn more about Mant¿s in the latest installment of the Stanchion Spotlight.
