New Books Network Diamond Forde, "The Book of Alice" (Scribner, 2026)
Feb 28, 2026
Diamond Forde, poet and professor who reimagines her grandmother's life in The Book of Alice. She discusses inheriting the family Bible and reshaping the King James language into imagined psalms. The conversation covers recipes as archives, choir-driven voice and musical performance, multimodal page design, and using red-letter text to mark spoken memory.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Object As Portal To Family History
- Objects can act as entryways to family history and self-understanding by making inherited meanings visible.
- Diamond Forde used her grandmother's Bible to trace inheritances shaping her identity and poetic inquiry during graduate work.
Reading Psalms In A Tornado For Comfort
- Diamond describes receiving the Bible from her aunt before moving to Tuscaloosa and reading Psalms during a tornado warning.
- She hid in her bathtub with the Bible and her phone, reading Psalms all night for comfort and connection to her grandmother.
Bible As Translated Archive To Reexamine Power
- Defamiliarizing the Bible required treating it as another translation with mistranslations and power dynamics to interrogate.
- Forde researched translation history and Black women’s reading strategies to center marginalized figures within biblical narratives.
