Winner of Hanging Loose Press's annual Founders Award for a first book of poetry, Affidavit captures the passionate intensity of motherhood and custody battles within the constraining shape of bureaucratic legal forms. Presenting us with the horrors of incarceration and the wonders of birth, these poems testify to the power of parental love even amidst the suffocating apparatuses of the courtroom. Formally and emotionally complex, Affidavit pays attention to what happens when private lives are forced into public arenas of judgement. May-lee Chai described Starr Davis as "A writer whose work inspires both hope and rage, leaving me eager to read more of this singular voice."

Starr Davis is the author of Affidavit from Hanging Loose Press, which is the winner of the Founder's Prize. She is also the author of the memoir I Am Mostly Bad Blood, which was the winner of the 2024 Autumn House nonfiction prize and will be published this fall. Her writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and Palette Poetry, where she won third place in the 2023 Sappho Prize for Women Poets. She serves as creative nonfiction editor at TriQuarterly, is a fellow with both the Center for Art & Advocacy, and the Texas After Violence Project, and and was a poetry instructor with Brooklyn Poets. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from City College of New York and a BA in Journalism and Creative Writing from the University of Akron. Her work explores motherhood, justice, and survival.

"A writer whose work inspires both hope and rage, leaving me eager to read more of this singular voice." — May=lee Chai

"These poems are relentless: they will not let us pretend that Davis's body exists apart from its familial or social history; they will not let us go until we accept as evidence the painful truths that the courts can't hear, but that are always in poetry's purview." — Evie Shockley