Nordette N. Adams is a published poet, fiction writer, and journalist. She grew up in New Orleans, moved away at 20, and returned in 2007.
Writing online since the early days of the Internet, Adams developed successful blogs while living in New Jersey (Confessions of a Jersey Goddess, NJ Spoken Word) and later in her hometown (Whose Shoes Are These Anyway?). In late 2006, she became a contributing editor for BlogHer.com, a leading website for women writers and readers. Simultaneously, while in New Jersey, she worked as a freelance reporter writing hard news and feature stories for the Westfield Leader and Scotch Plains-Fanwood Times. Her regular beat was Education; however, she covered elections, zoning commission meetings, and court trials as well.
Published at her personal blogs and other websites, her work has been included and referenced in books such as the Social Issues in Literature series by Greenhaven Press, The Parent App: Understanding Families in the Digital Age by Lynn Schofield Clark, and Sapphire's Literary Breakthrough: Erotic Literacies, Feminist Pedagogies edited by Elizabeth McNeil et al. Her critical analyses have also been quoted in scholarly journals such as TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics and news publications such as USA Today, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, Vox, Pajiba, Takepart,Slate, NOLA.com, SheKnows, and other media websites in the United States, Canada, and abroad. In January 2016, her 2014 blog post critiquing the Oxford English Dictionary's choice to use the phrase "a rabid feminist" as its common usage example for the word "rabid" drew international attention and played a role in influencing the dictionary company to review its choice.
Adams has worked as the Political Communications Coordinator for a national nonprofit, provided public relations services to First Grace United Methodist Church of New Orleans, and currently volunteers as a court observer with Court Watch Nola, a nonprofit organization that monitors the New Orleans criminal justice system.
During the 1990s, while working as a public relations specialist at a government nuclear facility in South Carolina, Adams ably put into practice the public relations training she gained at her alma mater, Augusta State University in Georgia. At the facility, she ghost-wrote white papers, trade articles, talking points, and presentations for Department of Energy managers and environmental engineers.
Her other work there included penning scripts, producing documentaries, and developing and executing media plans. She successfully nurtured relationships with local media to ensure various environmental restoration projects received television and newspaper coverage. Much of her work focused on informing the public and reporters about the innovative bioremediation of nuclear waste sites and facilitating the DOE's relationship with the Citizens' Advisory Board. Adams also supervised a staff of writers while in this position.
Poetry
Throughout her professional public relations and writing career, Adams has continued her creative work as a poet and fiction writer. She is a winner of the Sandhills Literary Magazine award in fiction, and her poetry has been published in Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, About Place Journal, Quaint Magazine, the Adagio Verse Quarterly, Poetry Life and Times, Voices for Africa, Hellicane, and other publications, including educational curricula in New York, New Jersey, Florida, and India. Furthermore, students and guest speakers have recited her poems at social justice events, and young people have turned some of her work into videos.
Another powerful and unique piece taking on police violence against black people is "Digital Anthropologists Find Our Hashtags" by Nordette N. Adams. The poem opens with "Dear #AltonSterling, Your face reminds me of my brother." Then, Adams develops imagined social media exchanges responding to police shootings of unarmed black men, including Alton Sterling, Trayvon Martin, and Philando Castile—bringing real lives and new media into the poetic form.
Adams has read her work with other poets at the invitation of Louisiana's then-State Poet Laureate Julie Kane at the Louisiana State Library. She has been an invited reader for the Why There Are Words series, the Dogfish Reading Series, The Tennessee Williams Festival, Unlikely Salons, Northwestern State University of Louisiana's Cane River Reading Series, at Latter Library's Poetry Buffet in New Orleans, and at the first annual New Orleans Poetry Festival. In addition to these events, Adams produced the International Beat Poetry Festival of New Orleans on behalf of an out-of-state nonprofit group in 2015. Also, under a Poets & Writers grant, she led a 4-week workshop for senior citizens at Kinship Center of New Orleans, and she is a member of the Peauxdunque Review's editorial board.
Always experimenting, she's created animated gifs and videos for some of her work such as the poem "Misery" posted below.
She also put her poem "The Green Green Grass" into an animated format.
Adams was awarded the Marcus B. Christian Scholar scholarship to attend graduate school. She has an MFA in poetry and an MA in English from the University of New Orleans.