A Virtual Interview with Katherine Hoerth

Background

Thursday, March 9, 2023 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. CST in-store and on-line:

In-Store: 5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, Texas 78751 (masks required)

Zoom Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-featuring-katie-hoerth-tickets-536611097237

Hoerth is the author of five poetry collections, including Flare Stacks in Full Bloom (Texas Review Press, 2022), The Lost Chronicles of Slue Foot Sue (Angelina River Press, 2018), Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots (Lamar University Literary Press, 2014), and The Garden Uprooted (Slough Press, 2012). She is the recipient of the 2021 Poetry of the Plains Prize from North Dakota State University Press and the 2015 Helen C. Smith Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters for the best book of poetry in Texas. Her work has been published in numerous literary magazines including Literary Imagination (Oxford University Press), Valparaiso Review, and I-70. She is an assistant professor at Lamar University and editor of Lamar University Literary Press.

The Interview

CH: What is your first memory of poetry? Where would you say your love affair with poetry began?

KH: I had my very first poetry reading when I was in high school, and since then, I was hooked! My art teacher organized an “art evening” event where we decorated the school lobby with our artwork and set a stage for open mic poetry. We even served little coffee drinks too. I felt very sophisticated! Back then, I mostly just wrote angsty poetry about being a teenager as a means for sharing these feelings with my friends. I didn’t really know that poetry was a thing living people did until this art event, and from there on, I knew I wanted to keep writing.

CH: When did you start thinking of yourself as a writer? As a poet?

KH: I always tell my students that you should see yourself as a writer once you’ve written a poem that makes you feel. I don’t think I followed my own advice though when I was younger. Publication is what made me feel like I was a “real” poet. My first publication was my university’s undergraduate literary journal, Gallery, so I’d say once I saw my poem in print, it started to feel more “real” to me.

CH: What inspired you to pursue a career in academics? How has teaching influenced your work as a poet? What are some things you’ve learned from your students?

KH: Poetry is my first love, and teaching is my second. I’m so fortunate that every day, I get to do the two things I love most. My professors influenced me to want to give to others what they had given to me—a realization of my poetic voice. I wanted to do that for others. I write alongside my students and participate in their workshops, so they keep me on my toes.

My students at Lamar are AMAZING. I love them so much. This past fall, I was teaching a group of graduate students, and what struck me is that they were so very KIND to one another. I saw in them the power of kindness to nurture the poetic voice. So it was an invaluable reminder for me.

CH: In addition to your teaching responsibilities, you’re also the poetry editor for Lamar University Literary Press—yet you’ve managed to publish five full-length collections of poetry over the last eleven years. What is your writing practice like? How do you create the room necessary for your own work?

KH: I go through seasons in my writing where sometimes I’m wildly prolific, and sometimes I’m letting the creative brain rest and focus on other things like teaching or editing or life. I also know myself. I know that mornings are the best times for me to write. Summers are typically times when I’m able to get a lot of creative work done as well. If I’m not writing in the midst of a busy semester or when I have a big publishing project on my hands, I don’t beat myself up about it! I know I’ll get back to writing when I have the time and creative brainspace for it.

CH: Your website mentions that your poetry is informed by “Revisionist Mythmaking and New Formalism.” Your book The Lost Chronicles of Slue Foot Sue is certainly grounded in the former. Tell us a little about your take on mythmaking in poetry.

KH: Revisionist mythmaking is re-imagining the myths, stories, and legends that make up our cultural discourse. Our identities are made up of stories—whether it’s Biblical stories we might have learned in Sunday school or the fairy tales our parents told us growing up. I became interested in the way that stories influence and reflect our identities. Eve is absolutely my muse. My first book was entirely re-imagining Eve’s story in contemporary south Texas, which is where I’m from. I wanted Eve’s story to be one of empowerment, so I thought of the different perspectives from which  to tell her story. I’ve also gotten really into classical mythology, retelling the stories of the goddesses, along with folk tales from Texas legends.

CH: I understand your life has long been rooted in south Texas. How has your view of that landscape changed over time? What is one of your favorite things about south Texas?

KH: I grew up in McAllen, Texas and spent much of my adult life in Edinburg, Texas as well. I love the Rio Grande Valley and will always consider it my home. It’s such a unique landscape—a place where ecosystems merge, which results in this amazing biodiversity. However, if you’ve been to the valley lately, you’ll see how fast it’s urbanizing! The strip malls and neighborhoods have all but snuffed out much of the original scrub forests.

My favorite thing about south Texas is the birds. It’s part of this flyway that millions of migratory birds pass through it every year. Living away from the valley has made me realize how magical it is, with its green parrots flocking in the trees, the chachalacas singing in the palm trees, and flocks of more grackles than anyone could dare count ascent on the HEB parking lots. I thought all of this was normal until I left, but there is no other place like it!

CH: The title and cover of your new collection, Flare Stacks in Full Bloom (Texas Review Press, 2022), makes me think not only of “traditional” industrial areas like Texas’ “golden triangle,” but also ones developed recently with the advent of fracking, like the oil and gas fields of south Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale. Please tell us a little about this book and the spark that started the collection.

KH: Yes! There are poems in this collection about all corners of Texas. That’s because just about all of Texas is affected, in one way or another, by the petrochemical industries. I live and teach in the Golden Triangle, so many of the poems are about the industrialization of the region and how it’s both a blessing and a curse. The poem also chronicles the impact of natural disasters and climate change on Texas. I moved to Beaumont just a week before Hurricane Harvey hit, so I was baptized in the flood water so to speak! I learned quickly what it meant, in a very real sense, to live and survive in southeast Texas. So the book is about my experience in Harvey told from an ecofeminist perspective. I also wrote a lot of sonnets in that book because I love sonnets!

CH: You have another collection, Borderlands Mujeres, coming out (or just out) from Stephen F. Austin University Press, and I understand it’s a bilingual collaboration. Please tell us about this collection.

KH: I’m so excited for this book to be released. I’ve been working with two amazing women on it—Corine McCormack Whittemore and Julieta Corpus. Corine is a graphic designer and artist, and her artwork inspired the entire collection. She takes photographs of cultural landscapes in the valley, and after seeing her artwork, I asked if she would mind if I wrote some poetry about them. Then, we asked my friend, Julieta, to join the project and write responses in her native Spanish. It’s a collaborative collection that explores womanhood in the borderlands. It hasn’t been published yet—we’ve run into some challenges with our publisher and the difficulties of printing colored artwork in a book. But we’re working on it and hope to have the book out soon.

CH: You’ve published poetry collections with a variety of presses, from small press to university-affiliate. What do you look for when you are trying to place a manuscript? What advice would you give to poets who are looking to publish their first full-length collection?

KH:  The first question I ask myself when I’m thinking to submit to a publisher is whether or not I admire the other books that publisher has recently put out. So my best advice is to read voraciously, find the publisher who is putting out books you love and books like yours, and submit there. Also, don’t be discouraged by rejection. Persistence is so important in this field. Always keep growing, keep improving your manuscript, keep submitting, and keep reading. If you stick with it long enough, and doggedly enough, you will find success.

CH: The job of English professor comes with a lot of required reading. What do you read for fun?

KH: Lately, I’ve become a big fan of audiobooks! That way, I can rest my eyes or do something active while I’m “reading” for leisure. I’m currently reading Demon Copperhead, a novel by Barbara Kingsolver that re-imagines Dicken’s David Copperfield in contemporary Appalachia. I love novels that can read like poetry, and this is one of those. It’s beautiful and tragic all at once.

A Virtual Interview with Emily Hockaday

Background

January 19, 2023 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-presents-naming-the-ghost-an-evening-of-poetry-tickets-483999233737

Please join BookWoman for a “conversation in poetry” celebrating the publication of Emily Hockaday’s inaugural poetry collection, Naming the Ghost (Cornerstone Press, 2022). Reading with Emily will be Matthew Zapruder and Diana Marie Delgado.

Emily Hockaday is the author of five chapbooks and another full-length forthcoming in 2023. Her work has also been featured in NPR’s RadioLab. In NAMING THE GHOST, a woman who loses her father and becomes a new mother now has to deal with a ghost that haunts her home. As the speaker learns more about the ghost, she realizes that it is something more—it is her grief and chronic illness manifested in another form. Heartfelt and forthright, this collection navigates important questions of health, life, and new parenthood, giving way to “otherworldly, yet grounded” (Jared Harél) poems.

The Interview

CH: What is your first memory of poetry? What drew you to it as a means of expression?

EH: My first memory of writing poetry is a book of poems I created on stapled-together stationery in the second grade. I inflicted these upon my family and a good friend who contributed a poem herself.

Unfortunately I can’t pinpoint my first memory of hearing poetry, but now that I have a kid I recognize that much of the children’s book genre is poetry. Goodnight Moon and A Child’s Good Night Book, both by Margaret Wise Brown, were books that have stuck with me and many others too I’m sure.

I think what drew me to poetry is that it is a deceptively small form while containing huge drama. I’ve always been attracted to the dramatic! The potential for quick catharsis of angst is very compelling.

CH: I understand you earned an MFA from New York University. How did that experience help shape you as a writer?

EH: Getting my MFA helped me take my writing seriously. I realized that while I wouldn’t get rich writing poetry, I could still consider it a career or vocation. It was incredible to be among other writers who were prioritizing and committing to their craft.

I also had the fortune to learn from wonderful teachers—Sharon Olds, Kimiko Hahn, Matthew Rohrer, Phillis Levin, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Matthew Zapruder (who will be reading with me). Studying with them was such a privilege.

CH: Congratulations on the publication of your debut full-length collection, Naming the Ghost. Please tell us a little about how the book came about.

EH: Thank you! This book is very close to me, because it chronicles a really wild time in my life. About a year after my father died of ALS, I started experiencing unsettling symptoms—which would later be diagnosed as fibromyalgia. It was extremely hard to get this diagnosis. I saw specialists who did nerve tests, blood tests, exams, etc, and kept hearing that I was healthy. At this time I was also caring for my toddler. I became obsessed with the symptoms that were plaguing me, and this turned into acute, clinical anxiety. I was basically running on adrenaline 24/7. It really felt like I was haunted! At this time, I was committed to a poem-a-day practice, and at some point the poems became lyrical diaries with this ghost!

CH: The speaker of Naming the Ghost inhabits a complicated landscape of life: new parenthood suffused with the grief of a parent’s death. How was it to work with this material in the context of our culture’s tendency to minimize or dismiss grief?

EH: I think a big part of Naming the Ghost is this fight for speaking about what is taboo. There is the taboo aspect of grief—the feeling that after a point it should be over, or at least should no longer be talked about—and then the taboo aspect of mental health. I was essentially having a nervous breakdown while I wrote these poems, but I felt I had to hide it. Go to work as normal, socialize as normal, except at those times when the fatigue, pain, and anxiety literally took me down.

CH: There’s a pivotal moment late in the collection when the speaker is at last able to name the ghost. Tell us about that place from your standpoint as a writer.

EH: Because Naming the Ghost is a narrative, I wanted it to have resolution. Not as neat a resolution as we might like, but I did want the story of the poems to have a beginning, middle, and end. It was important to me that the poems not only showcase the illness and grief in the speaker’s life, but also the healing. That’s what this moment is for me: the speaker sees the ghost and really recognizes it, sees what its purpose has been, and this kind of allows her to get better.

CH: Over the last decade you’ve had a rich publishing life, with the publication of your five chapbooks Starting a Life (Finishing Line Press, 2012), What We Love and Will Not Give Up (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), Ophelia: A Botanist’s Guide (Zoo Cake Press, 2015), Space on Earth (Grey Book Press, 2019), and Beach Vocabulary (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2020). Looking back over the last decade, how would you say your writing has evolved? What’s remained consistent?

EH: One thing that I can see having remained consistent (except for Ophelia, which is an outlier) is that most of my poems are inspired by my own life. They are fictionalized and sensationalized for the sake of drama (of course!), but most, at their core, are my own experiences and musings. Even the surreal or fantastical poems.

I’d like to imagine that my writing has evolved for the better—the craft stronger and the voice wiser—but I can’t honestly say that. The voice has gotten … more experienced, but there are poems in What We Love and Space on Earth that are very angsty and youthful that I still love. I’m not that speaker anymore, but I have tenderness for her, and I think her voice can still speak to readers.

As the years progress, I’ve turned more and more to ecopoetry. When I started out, I wrestled with internalized misogyny keeping me from writing poems about nature. Even though I loved Mary Oliver and other poets who wrote nature, I felt that if I myself wrote poems about the natural world I’d be pigeonholed or sidelined as so many women have been. My next book (In a Body, Small Harbor Publishing 2023) is ecopoetry, and the two manuscripts I’m working on assembling now have strong themes of nature and ecology as well.

CH: I understand you work for Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and co-edited the horror anthology Terror at the Crossroads with Jackie Sherbow. Do you see an influence of these experiences on your own writing?

EH: Yes, I’m senior managing editor for the two science fiction magazines, and Jackie and I coedited Terror at the Crossroads, which pulls horror stories from the two SF magazines I work for and the two mystery/crime magazines they work for (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine). It was really fun working on that collection with them. I don’t write horror usually, but I love horror fiction—as does Jackie—so that project was a labor of love for both of us.

Even though I work in science fiction and am a huge SF fan, I still typically write mundane poetry (to the extant that any poetry can be considered mundane). I have done a little speculative writing, though, which is probably influenced by the magazines. I consider Naming the Ghost speculative in its own way. Even though the ghost is a metaphor, it’s also there—and doing some serious haunting!

CH: I understand you have a second full-length collection forthcoming from Small Harbor Publishing in 2023. Please tell us a little about it.

EH: In a Body is in some ways a thematic companion to Naming the Ghost, in that it still deals with chronic illness, parenting, and grief. But in subject and style it is completely different. In a Body tackles these themes with an ecological bent. The book looks to plant, animal, fungal, and geological bodies—and how they fit into the Earth’s ecosystems—as a way of understanding the human body both as its own little ecosystem and as a part of nature. There is a sense of acceptance of the chronic illness in this collection. And each poem is basically standalone—there’s no obvious narrative like in Naming the Ghost.

CH: What words of advice or encouragement would you share with a writer who’s starting out?

EH: The best advice I can give is to find a community! Without my writing group and workshop (who both meet over Zoom these days), I would be lost. It is invaluable to have folks to hold you accountable, support your writing, and offer honest feedback. I’m also part of a peer circle where we share goals and support. It’s easy to see yourself as one person writing into the void—but that is not the case. People are out there doing the same grind, and having peers to cheer you on is so helpful.

CH: What do you read for pleasure?

EH: I mostly read fiction and poetry for pleasure. I’d love to read more nonfiction, though! Some books that I read this year that I loved are Night Bitch by Rachel Yoder, The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, the third Finder book (all three are great) by Suzanne Palmer, Banana by Paul Hlava, The Girls in Queens by Christine Kandic Torres, Life on Mars by Tracy K Smith (I was late to this one!) & Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse. I also gleefully keep up with the Gamache series by Louise Penny and the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. As I have a five-year-old, I also have a pretty constant stream of kiddo chapter books that we read together. (If you’re looking for middle grade, the Haunted Library series is tops. Also Megabat!)

A Virtual Interview with Amy Shimshon-Santo

Background

Thursday, November 10, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-w-amy-shimshon-santo-tickets-414854941297

Feature Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo is a writer and educator who believes that creativity is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation. She is author of Catastrophic Molting (Flowersong Press, 2022), Even the Milky Way is Undocumented (Unsolicited Press, 2020), the limited edition chapbook Endless Bowls of Sky (Placeholder Press, 2020), and numerous peer-reviewed essays (GeoHumanities; Education, Citizenship, and Social Justice; UC Press, Imagining America, SUNY Press, Writers Project Ghana). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, ArtPlace America, Zócalo Public Square, Entropy, Tilt West, Boom CA, Yes Poetry, and are featured on Google Arts & Culture. Amy has been nominated for an Emmy Award, three Pushcart Prizes in poetry and creative nonfiction, a Rainbow Reads Award, and was a finalist for the Nightboat Book Poetry Prize. She has edited two books amplifying community voices: Et Al: New Voices in Arts Management with Genevieve Kaplan (Illinois Open Publishing Network, 2022) and Arts = Education (UC Press, 2010). Her teaching career has spanned research universities, community centers, K-12 schools, arts organizations, and spaces of incarceration. 

The Interview

CH: I’m delighted to welcome you to the Bookwoman 2^nd Thursday series! I want to start by asking about how you became interested in poetry and writing. What’s your first memory of poetry? Was there a particular early experience that drew you toward writing it?

AS²: My first memorable exposure to a poet was witnessing Maya Angelou read to friends from her new book And Still I Rise in a loft in San Francisco. I was a tween, and still wondering how to become a woman in a racist and patriarchal society. I wouldn’t have used those words yet, but I already knew that being beautiful meant being magazine thin, wealthy, Christian, and blonde. I was none of those things. 

Some people have seen la Virgen de Guadalupe in a tortilla. I saw Dr. Angelou in her natural flow, and it was a sacred experience. She was wearing a head wrap, canvas cargo pants, and stood tall as a woman possibly can, and must. She was a living tree. She enjoyed herself.  I immediately knew that being a woman could become a noble endeavor. Her voice and song and dance made me think, If that is what a woman could be, I could become one too. From the very start, “being a poet” has meant being a subaltern woman in her natural power.

I learned much later that my lineage is grounded in poetry, but a kind of verse that hegemonic society doesn’t recognize or name. My mother’s first language was Hebrew — one of the many ancient languages of the world. After reading a book on poetic form that didn’t mention any Jewish or African poets, I asked my mother if we had a poetic tradition. She is 90 and has translated the mystical writings of Abram Abulafia who wrote poems in the form of mandalas. She said, “of course we do,” and started singing the Shemah. Both she, and Yonatan Perry (an Ashkenasi and African American Rabbi), helped me see that our culture was born in song, verse, and meditation. One thing I love about ancient languages is the connection between poetry and music. Both Hebrew and Yoruba have tonal or musical notation and tropes. For us, language is culture and faith, and reading and writing are also singing and listening. While I was never told this in school. I came to this from family and friends. We were never without poetry.  We are made of it.

CH: I understand your creative career began in dance, performance, and capoeira. How have these embodied expressions influenced your writing?

I spent most of my life using movement to recalibrate my body vessel. I am a retired dancer. My regular writing practice begins with yoga asana or walking. Moving and writing are wed for me.When the new book, Catastrophic Molting, came out this September, I prepared for the launch by going into the studio everyday like a dancer would rehearse. I improvised dancing to each poem. I made images and short videos with them. I made collages. I wanted to create an experience where everyone could be inside the book together as a performance. The launch became a performance with live music, song, voice, dance, and imagery. That is an example of  me being in my nature. If I could, I would always perform to music and I would always dance with the poems.

CH: In addition to your Ph.D. and M.A. in urban planning from UCLA, you hold an M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch University and a B. A. in Latin American Studies from UC Santa Cruz. What influenced your decision to study writing at Antioch? How did it change your writing practice?

AS²: At the time, I didn’t want to live if I could not write. It felt necessary. Pleasure came from doing something I had always wanted to do. In an immigrant family, I was always pushed to do something reasonable yet revolutionary — something to help society but also ensure my self sufficiency. My mother famously advised that if I wanted to be an artist I must also be a plumber. That all comes from a fear of poverty, which I ingested at a young age. Maybe that’s also a psychic remnant of the trauma experienced by certain generations of Jewish people. Rationally or not, one fear’s that history’s shoe could drop at any moment —the next catastrophe, the next migration, the next exile. Fascism is always around the bend. 

As an artist, I struggled to feel that my creative impulses could be a responsible choice. Making art was a way to practice freedom of speech and to animate freedom as a verb. In retrospect, I should have just read Sylvia Wynter much sooner. Freedom of choice came with my father’s death. Life is not forever. Do what you love before it is too late. We can be in our nature and still do good in the world.

Studying at Antioch taught me the habits and discipline of a writer’s life: how to establish and keep reading and writing practices and goals. The MFA taught me to row my own little craft out on the water. It also placed me in a field where I could see other people writing, not necessarily the way I envisioned it, but something semelhante. It was good to be around people who share a passion for reading and writing. It also gave me Gayle Brandeis, who is a goddess of a person, and it gave me my first serious writers community.

CH: Your limited edition chapbook Endless Bowls of Sky came out from Placeholder Press in 2020. I understand the work of Nigerian-British poet and novelist Ben Okri is the source text for these erasures. How were you first exposed to Okri’s work and what made you choose it for this project? What was your process as you created these poems?

AS²: I made the chapbook when I became ill with COVID 19 before the invention of a vaccine. My life was suspended. I was afraid and felt powerless. Both the living and the dead, the human and the nonhuman, have creative agency in Okri’s The Famished Road. I read and read. I xeroxed random pages from the book and made erasures with a Sharpie. I also woke from a dream with the image of a calabash being cut in half, as if the planet had broken open. I used the visual elements of the half bowls of erased lines to accompany the poems. When I realized that I was finally mending — that I would live —I saw myself taking photos of flowers from the garden and placing them in my eyes, ears, and mouth. The graphic chapbook is a combination of all of these elements, the erasure poems, the bowls, and the collages with bodies and flowers. I learned that if I only had a few weeks left to live that I wanted to spend it writing and creating.

CH: Also in 2020, Unsolicited Press published your first full-length collection, Even the Milky Way is Undocumented. Tell us a little about this collection. When did you first conceive of it? Over what period were its poems written?

AS²: Even the Milky Way is Undocumented begins with the birth of my first born. It flows through almost 20 years including a family transition, becoming a single mother, my children growing into adults, and learning to parent myself and find value in my own voice. The last poem “esh” is Hebrew for ashes. Along the way, I went from burning my journals to lifting my words UP. 

I worked on many of the poems during the MFA. One day I visited my daughter who was working on a film in Puerto Rico. Poems circled around me like insects around a light. I came home with many new poems, extracted the poems from my thesis, and began to decipher the overarching story. I saw a woman trying to heal herself from an experience that was both magical (creating and caring for life) and traumatic (experiencing betrayal and loss). I wanted to get it all out of my body, and claim authorial rights over my life. I didn’t want to become the sum of things done unto me. I wanted to place myself in the front seat of my life. 

In one of the poems, “Autobiography of Air,” a woman comes back to meet herself 27 years later and gives love and respect to her own soul. She speaks in tongues of her burrows and planks. That poem came in the night and I found shards of it in the journal by my bedside when I awoke. This made me laugh and delight in knowing that time is circular, not linear. We can honor our labor and live again anytime that we are ready. 

With the new book, Catastrophic Molting, after all the work was done preparing for publication, I felt like a cocoon. I wanted to be the butterfly that emerged from the cocoon of the book, but I wasn’t. I was spun thread. The empty vessel. The book was the cocoon that made it possible. I thought a lot about this. Why am I the cocoon and not the butterfly? But what I came away from the process was: respect the cocoon. Writing is my cocoon. It is where I can dwell in transformation.

CH: Congratulations on the publication of Catastrophic Molting (Flowersong Press, 2022). I’m fascinated to read that the title refers to sea elephants’ collective ritual of loss and regeneration. Was this a project that began during the pandemic? Please tell us a little about this collection.

AS²: Thank you! 

The title came from my first journey away from home during the pandemic. After the uprising, I left my old life behind and became devoted to daily practice. I also reduced my teaching load and released my administrative duties at the university. Poetry led me though the pandemic as a companion and guide. After months of seclusion, I went with my children, and my son’s partner, up the Californian coast to visit Big Sur. 

We financed the trip with a commission from the poem: “And Still We Are Trying to Dream ” that became an exhibition in Cary, North Carolina. It was used in the first event the city’s public art program produced after being shuttered. They wanted to use the poem, along with key questions that Reva and Itzel had designed with their company Honey and Smoke, to engage youth and families in a discussion about racial justice. I zoomed in for the opening. It was exciting to see how a poem could catalyze a community conversation and help provide a safe space for talking about things that matter. I’d love to do more public art in the future. 

Anyway, we borrowed my brother’s SUV, and drove up the coast. Tall trees. Lichen. Seals, Seagulls, seaweed and tide pools. We witnessed the catastrophic molting of thousands of sea lions that gather each year on the coast. I was awestruck. As soon as I read the naturalists’ signs explaining why sea lions were resting together on the beach, I knew I wanted to make catastrophic molting into a poem or a book. Catastrophic Molting described how the pandemic and uprising had felt to me.  

The themes of the new book are illness, uprising, war, and recommitment to futures. They are summed up in two questions that guide the work: What have you had to let go of? What new fur (or skin) are you growing? The themes are difficult for a reason: we are shedding and becoming something new. The last four poems of the collection are finally able to move with this new energy into the world. They carry a kind of patience, self awareness, and devotion. This starts to happen with “Cease Fire,” and the confidence of “New Moon in Cancer” that speaks of “wanting and knowing how to be.”

CH: These three books coming out in two years suggest a period of prolific creativity. How have you created the space in your life to do this work? How has it transformed you?

AS²: When I respect myself, and allow myself the time, I am naturally prolific. My idea of a good day includes moving and writing. Creating is a ritual for living my best life. I love learning. Study, travel, and the creative process excite me. These practices have shaped the woman I have come to be. 

Coming to this understanding feels like a renewal for me later in my life.  I’m an extrovert who learned habits of codependency early on. I spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs, wants, and dreams over my own. Writing helps me redirect this tendency and focus inward like I should. Inward is also outward. It’s just an “outward” where I am included in the story and not made to be  invisible. 

A friend in the Ifa tradition once described my hyper-external focus as an overdeveloped quality of Yemanja (the mother of the fishes). Yemanja is my small mother, but my crowning Ori is cared for by Oya (the winds of change). Over time, I have learned that I am a healthier and happier person when my creativity is at the throne of my life in a leadership role. I can do other things, but I prefer engaging with the world as an artist. I’m happier that way. I feel closer to the bone, and closer to my truth. 

“Being prolific” is just me allowing myself to live and be as I actually am. I am prioritizing what the creative process has to teach me. When I honor my imagination, and grant it the space and grace to be, creativity brings me into the world alongside everything and everyone else. Being different is not a problem. It is not irresponsible. It is a gift and a superpower.

CH: In your bio, you state that you believe “creativity is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation,” and it seems to me your role as educator places you at that nexus as well. How has your work as an educator informed your work as a writer?

AS²: I have taught for over 30 years now. Teaching has been a way to remain curious, to cohabitate with ideas, literatures, and histories in a socialized way while investing in the next generation. In many ways, my heart lives in community. I teach because I love people. It is a way to do the necessary work of healing, decolonization, and decarbonizing in relationship. I teach to be a good mortal member of an ancient and interconnected world. I teach because I can (even as a mere momentary flash of consciousness, ideation, and sentiment). Teaching is a joyful investment in futures beyond my reach. I will always teach. It is one of the ways that I love.

CH: In the work you do at this intersection of creativity and social engagement, who are some of the poets to whom you turn for inspiration?

AS²: I read like most people eat. I want to always be open to inspiration. The public library helps me do that. The public library is the most radical (and, as a result, my favorite!) social institution that I’m aware of. Everywhere should have one. 

If you mean by inspiration, keeping company with the dead, I consistently return to the voices of Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Thich Nhat Hanh by listening to them read their own works. They have entered into my walking meditations and are a part of my personal biosphere. I study poets and poetry from my bookshelf, the library, and friendships: Rabindranath Tagore, Aimé Césaire, Cesar Vallejo, Yehuda Amichai, Adrienne Rich, Mary Oliver, Yusef Komunyaaka, Aracelis Girmay, Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger, Gioconda Belli, Efe Paul Azino, Gloria Carrera, Eleuterio Exaggat, Manuel Bolom Pale, Jenise Miller, Luivette Resto, V Kali, Leonora Simonovis, Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, Matthew Zapruder, Dan Bellm, Gayle Brandeis, A’bena Awuku Larbi, Katleho Kano, Raymond Antrobus, Dami Ajayi, Aremu Gemini, Jolyn Phillips, Mbali Malimela, the list goes on…

CH: What’s the most recent book of poetry you’ve read?

AS²: I just returned from communing and performing at two wonderful literary festivals in West Africa: the Pa Gya! Festival in Accra, Ghana run by Writers’ Project Ghana,  and the Lagos International Poetry Festival in Nigeria founded by Efe Paul Azino. The first two poetry books I’ve read that came home with me are October Blue by Obiageli A. Iloakasia and Woman Eat Me Whole by Ama Asantewa Diaka.