UAB poet wins prize but sticks to her working-class roots

Tina Mozelle Braziel is a poet and serves as executive director of the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at UAB.

But Braziel -- a first-generation college student whose father, grandfather and uncles were iron workers -- never forgets working-class people.

“They do a lot for us,’ she said.

And as a writer, she seeks “to give them the dignity they deserve,” Braziel said.

“I don't know if I always meet that goal, but I try to when I describe what their lives are like and what their goals are,” she said.

Braziel is referring in part to some of the poems in her collection, “Known by Salt,” which won the 2017 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry book contest awarded in January by Fresno State

She beat out 867 other entrants to win the $2,000 prize, and “Known by Salt” -- her debut full-length book -- will be published by Anhinga Press, probably by January 2019.

The prize at Fresno State honors the late poet Philip Levine, a founder of the school’s poetry writing program, a 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner and 2011 U.S. poet laureate.

In addition to being skillfully written, “Known by Salt” is “a celebration of Alabama,” particularly its forests, waterways and wildlife, according to poet and judge C. G. Hanzlicek.

No surprise, since Pell City native Braziel grew up on the water. “I love the natural world,” she said. “I love seeing wildlife, being out.”

Upon hearing she had won the prize, Braziel said she was “kind of shocked and thrilled at the same time” and that the personal impact of the award is “absolutely huge.”

It’s something she’s “been working toward for at least 15 years,” Braziel said.

She earned her MFA at The University of Oregon and has been published in numerous journals.

Her poetry chapbook, “Rooted by Thirst,” was published in 2016 by Porkbelly Press.

And she and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building themselves on Hydrangea Ridge in Remlap, Alabama.

That experience also finds its way into “Known by Salt.”

“Part of the book is about our building our own house by hand,” she said. “We did the hammering and sawing and the other heavy lifting. It tells a narrative with certain snippets or snapshots.”

It is not hard to see that Braziel comes from working-class roots.

She is getting her hands dirty as she builds her own house.

She crafts what Hanzlicek calls “well-wrought” poems.

And anyone who has spent time in what Yeats famously called “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” knows how much work is takes to create a great poem, one that will endure.

Braziel also takes a quiet pride in the enduring, well-wrought things that her construction-worker forebears have created.

“Anytime I’m in a room of people, maybe at UAB, I know that everyone in that room has driven over a bridge that my dad built,” she said. “They don’t know that, but I do.”