Good, who was killed during an encounter with a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis, was not only a mother and community member; she was also a creative writer and poet whose work reflected a disciplined attention to craft and a deep curiosity about the human condition. In the rush to debate policy, procedure, and accountability, her identity as an artist risks being flattened. Yet for those who knew her through her writing, Renee Good was first and foremost a poet.

She studied English and creative writing at Old Dominion University, where her work earned recognition for its originality and precision. One of her most widely discussed poems, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” was written during her undergraduate years and later received an Academy of American Poets Prize at the university level. The poem does not rely on spectacle; instead, it works through restraint, layering memory, observation, and discomfort into a meditation on learning, vulnerability, and the uneasy proximity between knowledge and loss. It is a poem that lingers not because it shocks, but because it listens.

That attentiveness characterizes much of Good’s writing. Her poems often move through domestic spaces, classrooms, bodies, and moments of quiet reckoning. They resist grand conclusions, preferring instead to dwell in uncertainty. This is the work of a writer interested in process rather than performance, in what it means to sit with experience rather than resolve it too quickly.

Some of her poems appeared in academic and literary contexts connected to her studies, including university-affiliated publications and prize features. Others circulated more informally—shared among classmates, read aloud at events, or posted in fragments online. Together, they form the outline of a voice still in motion, one that had not yet reached its fullest range but was unmistakably deliberate and searching.

Good described herself with characteristic humility: a writer, a mother, a partner, someone learning as she went. That self-description aligns with her work, which avoids posturing and instead makes room for tenderness, doubt, and care. Her poems suggest a writer who understood that language is not merely expressive but ethical—that how we name the world shapes how we live in it.

To remember Renee Good only through the circumstances of her death is to miss the quieter, more enduring truth of her life.