Now is a good time to revisit Whitney Terrell’s groundbreaking 2005 novel, “The King of Kings County,” inspired by the racist real estate covenants that formed many of the residential neighborhoods in Kansas City.

Wyatt says this poem was as tricky to write as a villanelle. Her work has been read on NPR, featured in “American Life in Poetry,” and published in journals including New Letters, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review.

“My family arose from a line that defines white privilege and power, in a place of authority that has twisted the lives of many. Over generations, my family helped shape the Jim Crow laws in Alabama, convict the innocent and protect the guilty. They profited from slavery, racial terror, the labor of hired convicts, the prison leasing system and took full advantage of all the other perks that go with wealth and easy access to the powerful.”