Remembering April Freely
April Freely passed away this week, unexpectedly. For those who were lucky enough to know her, she was a beautiful person in mind, body, and spirit, and an extraordinary poet and essayist. She had an uncommonly kind heart, clear on the world's complexity and brokenness, yet full of love for it and for her communities. Earlier this year, April lost her own mother, for whom she had cared in Ohio through long-term health issues. In 2020, April was named the Executive Director of Fire Island Art Residency and had been working on a poetry manuscript, along with other projects. Her work was published in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Gulf Coast and elsewhere, and she received fellowships and awards from the Ohio Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and CUE Art Foundation. April's recent poems on the experience of the racialized body in the healthcare establishment can be read here. One of her lyric essays, "Stand Your Ground," can be read here .
Along with Spring Ulmer, Jennifer S. Cheng is organizing this Go Fund Me to honor April and to help her brother, Oliver, with inevitable financial burdens relating to hospital and funeral costs. Funds raised will go directly to Oliver.
From Spring: “...I know/ I have to say the right words,” April writes. She was hardest on herself; her labor was “to say the right words,” and she worked harder at this than anyone I’ve known. She was a true friend, an exemplary person, and she died too soon in this America that claimed her “scapegoat body”; this America all her “jane crow era/mothers ...paid for” that she knew as her “home.” April graced this place. She graced me. Her words grace us. I miss her.
From Jenn: My heart breaks for this loss, for what feels like a disappearance, and for every obstacle and grief that April should not have had to endure during her lifetime. Before we even knew each other, April and I were tethered by the same writing teacher at our undergraduate program, then we attended the same graduate program, where she, Spring, and I shared a language as we supported one other through difficult years, and afterward she and I moved to the same city. April was loved wherever she went--in her home community, her art and literary communities, her church community, and her queer community. I know that where she is now, April is a whole person, wholly known and loved.
