Therí Alyce Pickens is the author of New Body Politics (Routledge 2014) and Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke 2019). Her debut poetry collection is What Had Happened Was (Duke 2025).

Therí Alyce Pickens's Website.

About What Had Happened Was:

"In this engaging new collection of poetry, Therí Alyce Pickens demonstrates that she is a poet of depth, range, and often incisive humor. Her poems are a revelation."
—John Keene

"What Had Happened Was is a daring poet's debut. First and foremost, I want to praise Therí Alyce Pickens's collection for its unflinching attention to the nuances of—and everyday sorts of elaborate formal play embedded in—African American vernacular. It's truly refreshing, and energizing, to see the dynamism of Black linguistic expression live a full life in contemporary American poetry this way. It's all here. Love and loss, theory and autobiography, the ordinary and the transcendent."
—Joshua Bennett

"Few debut poetry books are long awaited. Without a doubt, What Had Happened Was is. When you work tirelessly and patiently to master your art—with skill, wisdom, and an abundance of imagination—it reads like this."
—Hayan Charara

"Therí Alyce Pickens writes a poetics of the body that considers history, politics, race, gender, and the everyday mundane ways that they are experienced in bones, in the brain, and on the skin. While reading through What Had Happened Was, you may find that this Black poetics is crip poetics, is what people call the confessional voice. WhatAlyce Pickens confesses of the body is how the world makes the body a question. If you understand in depth the expression, the answer is in how one would begin: “What had happened was . . ."
—Bettina Judd

"In her constantly surprising and deftly built poems, Therí Alyce Pickens enacts a poetics that refuses binaries, attends to and extends the power of Black art, and centers a body navigating illness.Alyce Pickens seamlessly moves through and braids memory, history, pop culture. The language is precise and remarkable; it will engage and entangle you in marvelous ways---as will the formally inventive poems and the structure itself.Alyce Pickens has written an electric first book. The poems are still sparking in my mind."
—Eduardo C. Corral