White Ghosts

White Ghosts, the debut collection by poet and novelist Katie Hale, traces maternal lines, and the legacies of slavery and whiteness interwoven into the fabric of America, through revealing, unflinching poems. Travelling deep into an intimate history that spans both sides of the Atlantic, Hale unravels the language haunting those narratives we choose to tell in official versions – through museum labels and civic statues – and in handed-down stories.

Transformational and challenging, these sharply-detailed poems interrogate the bare bones of silence, complicity, difficult inheritances and racial constructs. Via wagon routes or interstates, on desert highways or in the landscapes of northern England, through nature and through human culture, questions of ownership and power are writ into the journey. Through four hundred years of female migration, the poems in White Ghosts use art, music, and lyrical reworking of the curated space, to address white guilt: what is lost through generations, and what is passed on?



Katie Hale is an internationally recognised poet and novelist, who has held residencies and fellowships around the world. Her novel, My Name is Monster, was shortlisted for the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award and has been translated into multiple languages, and her second pamphlet, Assembly Instructions, won the Munster Chapbook Prize. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, Hawthornden Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, and was awarded a 2021 Northern Debut Award for White Ghosts. She lives in Cumbria, where she also writes for theatre and immersive digital performance, and mentors emerging poets.