Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis poet, wife and mother, was shot and killed Wednesday by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, setting off nationwide protests over the officer’s actions and the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies.
Good’s poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” was the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize winner at Old Dominion University.
Why It Matters
An ICE agent fatally shot Good on Wednesday while she was in her car in Minneapolis amid a series of immigration enforcement operations in major cities under President Donald Trump’s administration. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has insisted that Good was a threat to federal agents and that the agent fired in self-defense, while Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and other leading Democrats have sharply criticized ICE’s actions and said that video footage showed Good was only trying to drive away from the scene.
Local Democrats have repeated calls for ICE to leave the city, while pushing for a thorough investigation into the deadly shooting on a residential street in south Minneapolis, less than a mile from where police killed George Floyd in 2020.
What To Know
Rajiv Mohabir, a poetry professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who served as a guest judge selecting Good’s winning poem, told Newsweek in an email on Friday, “Good’s poem levitated out of the finalist submissions for me because of how specific references struck me.”
He continued: “I could see myself in the same struggle: justifying science and faith. What does it mean to define something until there is no wonder left? The poem asks me. The speaker in the poem has no answers, just experiences that illuminate the tensions that arise when trying to reconcile wonder against brutality. As a queer reader, I could also sense a queerness in the poem, a state of being between worlds and worldviews that really resonated with me then and still does.”
Her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” was selected from about two dozen submissions as a prize winner.
Here is an excerpt (stylized as per Poets.org):
can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom
now i can’t believe—
that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—
all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:
life is merely
to ovum and sperm
and where those two meet
and how often and how well
and what dies there.
Kent Wascom, director of the creative writing M.F.A. program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, remembers Good when she attended his fiction class.
“What I saw in her work was a writer that was trying to illuminate the lives of others,” he told The New York Times on Thursday.
Newsweek has reached out to Wascom for comment via email on Friday.
Good started Wascom’s class in fall 2019 and when the COVID-19 lockdown occurred the following spring, he told the Times, “I very much remember her being someone who made others feel better in that moment.”
Demonstrators rally before marching to the White House in Washington on January 8 as they protest against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE… | AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
What People Are Saying
Old Dominion University President Brian O. Hemphill said in a Wednesday statement: “It is with great sadness that Old Dominion University mourns the loss of one of our own, Renee (Macklin) Good, a proud Monarch who graduated in December of 2020 from the College of Arts and Letters with a degree in English. Following Renee’s tragic killing earlier today in Minneapolis, our thoughts and prayers are with her family, friends, loved ones, and the Monarch Nation. This is yet another clear example that fear and violence have sadly become commonplace in our nation. Indeed, this tragedy reflects the deep strain being felt in countless communities across our nation. As citizens, it is our duty and right to call upon leaders and officials to restore civility in all facets of our lives, especially at the hands of those who are entrusted to protect and serve.”
Rajiv Mohabir said in an email to Newsweek on Friday: “For me, poetry is not just about pretty words on a page. It must mean something, it must perform some transformative magic in the minds of the readers and the listeners. It has the potential to voice contestation against hostile regimes, their cultures of fear and intimidation. It has been necessary for survival as poetry provides the vehicle for oppressed people to speak out and speak up. It also offers the potential to galvanize communities in solidarity and foment change. As Audre Lorde says, Poetry is not a luxury. Poetry connects poet to reader and expands the universe of experience. It also connects its readers together, as if stars lined into constellation. Without the lines that we observers draw in the sky, what is a constellation? Poetry forms those lines, gives meaning to our connections. “
Minneapolis City Council Member Jamison Whiting told Newsweek in a Zoom interview Thursday: “We have had one homicide in the city of Minneapolis this year. And it was because of the federal administration… We are watching a deployment of destruction from a fascist federal administration that was walking down the middle of the street that many of us grew up on. Many of my colleagues grew up on. Watching them murder a mom, a wife, a Minneapolitan in the middle of our streets.”
President Donald Trump on Truth Social: “The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self-defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. The situation is being studied, in its entirety, but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis. They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE. We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate!”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, while discussing Good on NPR’s Morning Edition: “She was a compassionate neighbor trying to be a legal observer on behalf of her immigrant neighbors. That’s what she was doing at the moment of her death. And she was a poet. She was a mom. She was a daughter. And I am deeply saddened by what happened to her and her family.”
Vice President JD Vance, in an X post Wednesday: “I want every ICE officer to know that their president, vice president, and the entire administration stands behind them. To the radicals assaulting them, doxxing them, and threatening them: congratulations, we’re going to work even harder to enforce the law.”
What Happens Next
Federal and local agencies are likely to continue clashing over the investigation of Good’s death, with protests moving forward in Minneapolis and around the country.
A GoFundMe in support of Good’s family has raised over $1.45 million as of Friday morning.
Update, 1/12/26 at 4:03 p.m.: This article and the headline were updated.
