About Edra EJ Stephens
Edra EJ Stephens is a writer, cultural advocate, and community leader whose work bridges storytelling, heritage preservation, and social equity. Stephens illuminates the enduring traditions and voices of the Lowcountry, weaving narratives that explore identity, race, culture, and belonging.
A Watering Hole Fellow, National Arts Futures Fellow, and graduate of the University of South Carolina Beaufort with a Bachelor of Arts in English, where she was awarded The Tombe/Eby Award, her poetry and short stories have appeared in multiple anthologies. Her work embodies the belief that storytelling is both art and activism, an instrument of healing, empowerment, and transformation.
Featured Works
From poems shaped by memory and place to a memoir in progress, my work examines what we inherit, what we survive, and what we choose to carry forward.
Quote from upcoming book - "I searched for where I belonged and found myself standing in the space between what was given and what was true.”
"Collier Beach Blues"
where footprints dance upon clouds, swaying to sounds, floating at tides door howling haints sing hymns of death’s indigo
melanin glistening against the drag,
held tight to skinfolds on juke joints sandy floor indigo rids, upon haints slow blues
marsh hens cackled with glee, desires entry came free ma’granny cries for ner’come yah’s yanking
howling haints, hymns of death’s indigo
time, before lips touched a moon so bold shrimp boats beach’d from leaseholds due indigo hides, upon haints slow blues
life everlasting stifled smells of pluff’s undue sweetgrass chuckled, at buckruh’s stretch howling saints, sing hymns of death’s indigo
fireflies dance to salty sweetness long foretold footsteps of shine, holding greasy white bread howl haints of hymns at death’s indigo
groove to the sounds of boohag’s sadness riding the nights slow, salty groves howling hymns, at death’s indigo,
champagne ale gone, sparkling structures stand new what dat younder want, don’t you see it come due haints ride deaths waves to the juke joints door
Published on The Poetry Trail, and IWN Anthology Sea Change
"Southern Skies"
A mystery? Not really.
It lives within us
where love ends
hate begins
Under eyes closed
to what is owed
shuttered by pain
not buried, carried
Holding history
lingering not
unknown in the
bones we walk on
Within our anguish
we learn to adore
what tries to destroy
us.
This is no enigma it lives
where we begin and end.
"Courageous Living:
Steps to Breakthrough Your Fears"
Offers practical steps and personal anecdotes to help readers face and overcome their deepest fears.
In the Press
"USCB Student Selected for Prestigious Writers' Workshop"
USCB English major, Gullah poet and novelist Edra Stephens has been selected as a manuscript fellow for a prestigious writers’ workshop. She will join the tenth annual winter retreat of The Watering Hole, “a southern-based vanguard who builds Harlem Renaissance-style spaces in the contemporary South.” The purpose of the retreat is “to cultivate and inspire kinship between poets of color from all spoken and written traditions.”
USCBe Informed: News & Happenings
As her professor and mentor, Edra Stephens is one of those students who make me overjoyed to have entered the profession, "Malphrus wrote in an email.
"Edra's quiet demeanor belies the powerful force that rises through her words. The work is always a pleasure, but it is often disturbing. As I've said before, she backs away from nothing." Ellen Malphrus,
Bluffton and the Lowcountry Magazine