by Lauren K. Alleyne
Tim Seibles’ work pays impeccable attention to the world — its beauty and humor, its grief and pain, its infinitely wide-ranging and nuanced possibilities. The bedrock of his work is its keen imagery, at once familiar and surprising, and always exquisitely crafted. In his sensual poem, First Kiss, for example, Seibles captures the anticipation of the moment with a tsunami of detail, the senses wrapping into each other like the young lovers’ tongues: sight and song describe her mouth, which arrives “like a baby-blue Cadillac / packed with canaries driven / by a toucan”; touch and taste mimic the motion of lips, as the speaker declares, “it was as if she’d mixed / the sweat of an angel / with the taste of a tangerine.” Like the amorous pair, the language is alight with heat and longing, its repetitions circling readers’ minds like the kiss itself, which turns the speaker “into a glad planet— / sun on one side, night pouring / her slow hand over the other: one fire / flying the kite of another.” We all swoon.
While the immersive impact of Seibles’ images often offers intense delight, that quality also is deployed in the poems to confront injustice, and to articulate the speakers’ feelings about the state of the world with cutting clarity. In “Vendetta,” he observes the hollow machinations of politicians with contempt:
Look how they
work the stage
like cool comedians,
ribbing the nations this
way, then that—
gaff after giggle
filling the auditoriums
with the empty
skulls.
“Cool” is in tactile friction with “ribbing,” (though the proximity of their sounds simultaneously summons the notion that these clowns (“cool comedians”) are “coolly robbing” the nation, as well). The alliteration of “gaff” and “giggle” creates appealing sonic activity, even as the poem tells us it is meaningless and “empty.” Seibles’ controlled, but significant fury towards the status quo is effectively rendered in the image that follows, which is similarly biting:
I have held
my rage on a short
leash like a good,
mad dog whose bright
teeth could keep
the faces of our enemies
well lit.
His frustration, rage, and restraint thrums — sharp, dangerous and precisely rendered in the image of the restrained “good, mad dog” and its gleaming “bright teeth.”
Whether rhapsodizing on the beauty or brutality of the world, Seibles’ poems operate from the mission he articulates in his poem, “Faith”: “[t]ell the truth. If you can.”
Tim Seibles judged the 2022 Furious Flower Poetry Prize and read with the winner and honorable mention here at James Madison University. In the studio, we discussed the evolution of his poetics, his influences, the writing advice he didn’t listen to, and his commitment to writing both the struggles and the joys of being human. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Welcome to JMU, to Furious Flower, and The Fight & The Fiddle. It is such a pleasure to have you here and to be able to have this opportunity to talk with you. Somebody asked me this question yesterday, actually, and I’m gonna pass it on to you. Your work is a festival of the senses — the images are always so rich and so wonderful. What is your entryway? What is your entry into that particular modality? Where do your images come from? How do you begin?
Well, that’s a funny question. I think you begin, really, with the poets that you loved when you were first writing. You know, and people like Pablo Neruda for example, Yusef Komunyakaa, for example, Gwendolyn Brooks, for example. There’re so many people who have affected the way I think about what poems can do. Anne Sexton, for example, is another one—really rich images. And so, I think when you find in other writers that you admire things that resonate with you, that makes you want to be able to do something similar. And I don’t know whether it’s deliberate or not, but at a certain point, you begin to think in terms of images. When I’m writing, I don’t say I need an image here, necessarily. You know, you’re writing and it just seems to… if there is something you’ve said, that seems that you need to deepen the illustration, well, if you’re lucky, an image will come. And it doesn’t mean it comes, as you know, the first time. You could write and then go, that’s not what I mean. But you keep working and, I think at a certain point, the creation of imagery in language becomes a habit of mind. A lot of people think, Oh, where did you get such a simile? Well, if you, if you read a lot of things, especially you think about someone like Neruda, who was wildly rich with similes and strange images; after a certain point, if you’re lucky, it planted a seed in your own head.
And so over the years — I’ve been trying to write for around 40, 46 years now, thereabouts — bit by bit, I think your mind becomes a certain kind of place. And so, there’s all kinds of pictures in my head and connections, and so on, I’m writing, sometimes those things, if I’m lucky, if I’m having a good day, those things come kind of quickly or readily. As I said, it doesn’t mean it’s right the first time, but it’s just that I’ve never, or at least not in recent memory had a moment when I thought, I don’t have any images in my head. It feels like I’m overwhelmed. It’s selection: it’s too many images in my head. It’s a matter of finding the language for them. In fact, that’s where, of course, the revisions come in, and you know, you want to get the language, right, even if the image might be right, the language is suited, in a certain way. But that’s, that’s really the story of my life, in terms of imagery. I just think the people that I’ve loved, knew, have made my mind a different kind of place.
You just put together this New and Selected, and you’ve had this expansive experience with poetry. I’m curious: what did you groan or blush about in putting together this book? Or what surprised or delighted you about looking at the work from the beginning, all the way through?
Well, even the early things — things that I probably would not, or could not write at this age, you know — you see yourself in them still. So I still feel a tenderness toward all these crazy poems. There are people who are like, “Oh, I throw away all my early work.” I would never do that! Because it’s like a stepping stone. It’s like a staircase, right? You can’t get to the top if you don’t have the bottom steps! [Laughs.] So I’m still climbin’, you know? And so, you can’t disrespect those early poems. I mean, plus most — many, if not all — many of those early poems really are reflections of the people I was in love with. That I was reading as I was just learning, getting a sense of how poems work. How does imagery work in relation to abstraction? And so, I’m reading Merwin and Sexton and Komunyaka, and I mean, you can go down the list. There’s a poet by the name of Ralph Dickey that very few people know about because he committed suicide early in his life, a Black poet, I think he was probably gone by age 30. But man, you know, you’re talking about intensity and imagery. He was another one, but I don’t think anyone really knows about him. So, these are the people who were, you know, moving through me as I’m starting to just get my hands around how you can, you know, move from abstraction to image and also tell a story. Not that every poem is narrative, but there’s a sense of telling, and you want clarity, but you also want resonance. And so those are the poems that, if I look at, I can often say I know who I was trying to be — something like them, you know — not that I was succeeding, but they were clearly affecting what I was thinking about images and stuff like that. So I liked doing it, but the things that I found the most painful were having to leave poems out. You know, there are a lot of poems that I thought, ‘Oh, I really like that poem!’ but you just can’t put them all in the book, you know? That book would be this thick [Gestures.]. You’d be like, “oh, it’s a collected!” It’s not a “selected” if I put everything in there. So it’s really hard to be sure, but what I hope is that, as I read this book now, look at it now, is that it’s at least a reasonable cross-section of what I’ve tried to do with poems over the years. And with that, I can kind of be at peace with the fact that not every poem that I love is in there. That’s just the truth, you know?
And we can go back to the collections. [Laughs.]
That’s what I was going to say! Go back to the collections and find the other ones! [Laughs.]
Did you learn anything in putting those together? Was it instructive in any way?
I think what happens when you’re putting together a collection like this, is that it becomes very clear that you are developing and changing as a writer. When you’re doing it, you’re just doing it, you know? If someone had said to me before I wrote this book, would you say you’re changing as a writer? I would say yeah, I think so. But I mean, when you look at that [the collection], you think clearly you are changing as a writer, and part of it is, you know, as you get older, you start to, of course, close in on your own mortality. That’s one thing that begins to shape the way you think about everything, but certainly about poems. But also, you hopefully have gained a little bit of wisdom and it changes the way you write because maybe you know better about certain things, you know? And if you read a lot of people, and you’ve been, you know, thinking hard, hopefully, about what poems can do, then, you know, you can begin to kind of push boundaries and do things that maybe you haven’t seen other people do. And so that would be something I noticed — at a certain point, as I get later in this, closer to the present, I think, Boy, these are some poems I would have never thought to write when I was 30 or 40. I would have never thought to write this poem. And then you see, oh okay, so you know, your mind becomes, ideally, a richer, more capable place. And also, your mind becomes more efficient. I mean, I would liken it to the way a piano player who was very good at 30, at 60 can do things without even thinking about it because of the habit of working in a certain way with the piano. And I think it’s similar with language, I think at a certain point, there’re things that are just foundational in the way you think about words and composition. Whereas when I was 30, I think everything was more deliberate; I’m still thinking, okay, I’m trying to do this and this and this, but some things, after a while, are just there. Just as right now, I’m not thinking about how to talk. It’s just part of the way my mind works. And I think that happens, too, over the years in writing poems, there’s certain things you just understand beyond consciousness about composition and the way words can move from one thing to the next. And so that would also be something that’s probably helped me and changed the way I write also.
I just have this line written from “Dragon,” in the first section of this book; the line is “we must perfect our illusions.” It’s a haunting line, and I’m so curious about that idea of perfecting our illusions — how does that operate as a poetic tool?
Wow, I probably need to stop for an hour and just… you know, I’m not sure. It seems that much of what gets us through the day is based on, if not wishful thinking, at least a certain biased perspective of life, and what’s meaningful, and what’s not. And I think in absence of that— whether it’s a religious perspective, or whether it’s a matter of how you just feel about breathing — in the absence of those things, it would be almost impossible to live as a poet. I have this immense affection for and faith in language and its capacity to create community. I think that may be insane, you know? I mean, I think sometimes, You know what, man, people don’t think about language, you’re just out of your mind. But for me, it’s a thing that, first of all, sustains my practice as a writer. But also, it allows me to feel that my life, as someone who believes in words, is meaningful. Whether it’s an illusion or not (I think it can be argued), even if it is completely a fantasy in my head, it still allows me to do the work that feels important to me. And that’s, maybe that’s as close as I can do to giving you a poetic justification! [Laughs.]
Can you talk to me about how a poetics of witness enacts for you? How does it transfer to craft and practice?
Well, again, I would go back to poets that influenced the way I think about writing. And, of course, I came of age during the Black Arts Movement. And so I’m listening — I mean, I didn’t have any clear context of all that was happening, but I’m listening to a lot of Gil Scott Heron, and Nikki Giovanni in her really militant stage, and the Last Poets. And so, at least to my young sensibility, they were trying to talk back to the world, they were trying to say, I see this, and this is nonsense. I see this and this is necessary and true. I see this, which other people do not see, do you see what I see? This is what I was getting from them. And some of those poems, as you probably know, are pretty wild. “The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” for example — “Ferocious Peace!” — and then “Ego Tripping” by Nikki Giovanni. I mean, those were on the radio when I was a kid, you know? And at that time there were still stations that would consider themselves Black radio stations; by then it was really that you just simply weren’t going to hear certain things if you weren’t listening in Philly. It was WHAT and… was it WDAS? I’m not sure, it’s been a while… but those were stations where you would hear “Ego Tripping” or The Last Poets, “The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” And so I thought, that’s what poetry is supposed to do, at least in part. It’s supposed to say, This is unjust. This should not be happening. This should be happening, or, Have you seen this? If only to invite other people to just be engaged by something you’re engaged by.
As I said earlier, poetry is a community building tool. And so when I said when I try to write something that would be a poem of witness in which I’m trying to say, Look at this, I’m hoping that other people who read the poem will say, I see what you see and I understand why you feel the way you do, or I disagree with how you feel. But the whole idea is that there will be genuine engagement. And part of the way that’s accomplished, I think, anyway, is by being as clear as you can with what’s at stake, and what you see, so that people don’t walk away thinking, I just don’t understand what you’re talking about. I don’t want to give people that option of slipping out of the poem, because there are a lot of people, as you probably already know, that’s how they dodge poetry: I don’t want to know! I don’t understand it! When what they really mean is I’m afraid to understand it. That’s what they really mean. I’m afraid if I understand it, I might have to think differently. I’m afraid if I understand it, I might have to question my own life. That’s what they really mean. And so, for me if you write a poem of witness, or any poem truthfully, but specifically we’re talking about witness, you really don’t want to give people the option of “well, it sounds interesting, but I’m not doing that.” I don’t want to give you that option.
And when I listened to those early poems by some of the Black Arts Movement poets — Amiri Baraka, who would have been LeRoi Jones when I was a teenager. And then if you jump back to the Harlem Renaissance, this is very similar. Of course, the stakes are a little different, because the Harlem Renaissance writers, in many ways, are just saying Hello, we’re here. Black people are human, did you ever think about that, people? You know, they’re trying to just get the barest foundation, like we’re here, we’re real, you know? Our pains are real pains. Of course, by the Black Arts Movement, people are saying, We’re here, we’ve been here and we’re really getting tired of the way you’re treating us. That’s a very different angle, and different kind of tone. But in each case, though, there weren’t really a lot of places to dodge, you won’t find a bunch of really complicatedly obscure poems in either of those, not many, there’s some that might be more mysterious than others, but most of them are pretty much head on, one man, one woman talking to another man, another woman. They’re just talking and saying the things that I think can’t be reduced to, I don’t think I see it or you. You just can’t get around it, you know? “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”—think about early Hughes, you know? No one’s confused about what he’s trying to say about this woman’s life. You know? So that’s, to me, part of it. If poetry has real muscle, and I think it does, that’s where its power is in. It’s in clarity. And it also, hopefully, on the page, staging something that is clearly part of shared experience, whether you want to share it or not is another question… But it’s part of shared experience.
I mean, people don’t necessarily want to hear about certain things. There are poems I’ve written I’m sure people don’t necessarily want to hear — particularly, if we’re dealing with a critique of a larger mainstream/white society, and not everyone can deal with that. But if you are going to be an artist of any integrity, you gotta to say what you know. And if people like it, that’s wonderful. If they don’t, that’s part of life, too. You know, you have to just keep on walking.
I’m interested in, too, a slightly alongside question around witnessing joy. You mentioned in the opening “Open Letter” that now there’s another sort of almost burden on the Black writer — that we’re only meant to witness a certain kind of pain, experience, struggle, and that has become synonymous with the Black experience. So I’m curious then: what’s the other side of that?
Well, I mean, you referred to the “Open Letter,” and I think certainly as people of color, we have plenty to complain about. I don’t want to, by any means, understate that. But the thing is — I really don’t think any of us Black people want to forget about the joy we take in being alive. What’s the point of being alive if we don’t understand why it’s lovely to live, you know? And so I think, to some extent, and this probably earlier in my life, I made a conscious decision to try to write poems that were funny or mischievous, and poems that were just fun, pleasurable, you know? The poems that are erotic, for example, are me kind of insisting on a certain kind of delight in being a human being and being physical. And the fact that we’re here, embodied, at least for a little while, you know? I don’t know if I’ve answered your question well, but those are things that I think about a lot.
At this point, the balance seems to come more or less organically, I don’t really have to say, “Uh oh, I’ve been writing sad poems, I better write a happy one!” I don’t really do that. And so early on what was funny is, I didn’t know what to do with real grief or rage. In my early life as a writer — this was before I was writing anything that was probably publishable — I would write only funny poems, you know? Just poems that were on the lighter end, they might have been a little bit more; hopefully, they were somewhat imaginative, but they were mostly light. And then I thought you’ve got to try to write things that are a little more true to the difficult parts of life. And then I wrote this poem, I was probably 19, called “The Funeral.” It was the first time I wrote this very heavy poem about death and dealing with death directly. And from that point, I began to be able to move in both directions. Now, again, I don’t know if I was doing it effectively at that age. That’s a different question. But I like to laugh. I do. I like lots of things about life. But there’s this other thing that we have to deal with, too. And I say this in “Open letter,” as well. It’s not only for Black folks or people of color, you know, everyone will be better off if we deal with reality in an honest way. We can all be free if we finally embrace the facts of the history in this country, and if we allow everyone to feel the fullness of humanity. I’m just trying to make a case for that. That’s all I’m trying to do, really.
But I like funny poems and some of the poets I liked as a young guy were funny. You don’t know the poems of Russell Edson by any chance, do you? You wouldn’t, necessarily; I was lucky. I had some pretty wild teachers when I first started studying, and Edson’s poems are just crazy and funny. I saw him read once — everyone was dying in there. And it’s not stand-up comedy. No, it’s more complex and strange than that. And I thought that if I had any doubts about whether I wanted to be able to use humor, man, it was over. I want to use poems that are funny and crazy and strange, too. But also, at the same time, you have to write poems that are dealing more or less directly with difficulty and things that enrage you or make you very sad. But I do want to keep that current alive. And all of us that can laugh and dance and, for a moment at least, not feel worried or put upon by the insanities of the larger culture.
You mentioned a lot of the folks you’ve paid attention to and been inspired by; what’s the best poetry advice you didn’t listen to?
Well, early on, I got the impression — but I can’t say this was true of all the workshop leaders — but from some of them, I got the impression that they felt that one’s work should always be beholden to other readers; that somehow there should always be an “Overmind” when you’re working. And I can be very hard-headed, you know? That’s probably reflected in this book as well. And I thought, no. At a certain point, I’m gonna write the poems that I want to write. I don’t really need anyone else’s sanction or approval. I don’t need that. So that was probably something I might have abandoned too soon, truthfully. But really, I really felt that my love for poems and for words would oblige me to learn the craft well enough to write the poems I felt needed to be written. And at a certain point, I just thought, you know what, I don’t believe I need someone else to make sure I did it right.
I used to love Merwin when I was in college. I still admire him. He’s long gone now. He said someone asked him about workshops, and I’ll never forget this because the workshop leaders in the room were not that crazy about it, but I understood what he meant, and I didn’t take it as a harsh critique of the workshop, necessarily. But maybe he was suggesting that there’s a point at which one might let those things go. He said, “No one can tell you how to listen for what only you can hear.” And I’ll never forget that. I think the workshop leaders were thinking, Are you saying we don’t need workshops? and I don’t think that’s what he meant. I think, of course, as young writers, we need someone to give us some shaping, but I think at a certain point, your sensibility is formed. And it’s really up to you to make sure what you understand or know or feel is made beautifully manifest in language. If you don’t do it well, that’s a craft issue. And it’s not like someone else can help you not make certain mistakes. Also, you think about, let’s say, take someone like Wayne Shorter on saxophone—at what point did he stop in the middle of a solo and say Am I soloing, right? Does this sound good? He’s playing what he believes must be played. Now, does everyone love it? Probably not. But some people do. And for him, it’s a clear manifestation of what he knows in his heart and soul. And for me at a certain point, that’s what a poem is, too. There’re certain things that I believe, however delusionally, that I know or see clearly. And so, I’m trying to say, Here, here’s what I think. And if I have integrity, then I’ve written carefully and revised and thought and thought and made the best thing I can make. I don’t need anybody else’s approval. I don’t need anybody looking over my shoulder, you know? And if you like it, great, and if you don’t, maybe you’ll like the next one?
I love that term, the “Overmind’’
Yeah, I really reject that.
You’ve been a teacher for a really long time, and you’re here as a judge for the 2022 Furious Flower poetry prize. And I’m curious about what’s interesting and engaging to you about the younger, newer, emerging poets, you’ve had the opportunity to see and read and be in contact with.
Oh, man. Well, I tell you, if we just talk about the poets that I saw in the Furious Flower contest, what you see is — and I know, these are writers, you know, they are not by any means beginning writers, if they were, I’d be terrified. If you’re beginning this way, Lord, you’re already way past me. But what I see is that their understanding of craft and the width of their reading is clearly different than what it would have been when I was a young writer. I tried to read widely and so on, I certainly did. But I just think what I saw, particularly in the Furious Flower prize, among those poets and poems, you know, there was just so much going on. That was, I mean, not absolutely brand new, but certainly they were heading out in directions that were clearly related to what poets have already done, but clearly, they’ve kind of taken on their voices in a way, with a kind of competence that I think would have been harder to find when I was a younger writer. There was a sense that they were really headlong after something, and it was just a matter of degrees to which their knowledge of craft would allow them to make it manifest. But that would be something that’s different.
And I do think the spoken word community has impacted, for better I think, mostly, the poetics that people work with on the page. I really think that’s an important shift, too. There was no spoken word as we now know it, when I was 30, for example. You, of course, had Gil Scott Heron and The Last Poets and other poets who did what might have been called spoken word, but there was no general community of people who got up on stage and said poems — that just didn’t exist. And I think that did a couple things. One is, I think it gave writers, who are not necessarily “trained” courage to raise their voices. And also, I think it allowed people a larger understanding of what might be said, that poetry doesn’t have to be tame, or polite necessarily. I wish there was more rambunctiousness, as you saw in the introduction, but I like that about poets. But it’s also true that it feels like writers who are early in their careers are more sophisticated than I or my peers who might have been 30 or 35. I don’t know. That’s my sense of it.
Well, I wonder, too, and this is not flattery. But I wonder, too, if that is a product of like, you point out to the spoken word for sure. But like just the expansion of [unsure], because they got to read you, Tim. [Laughs.]
Well, I hope that my work has contributed to opening a few doors to other possibilities. Just like other writers did for me — you see things that you couldn’t have seen without their work. And I hope that my poems offered that to some writers as they were coming on. I certainly do. And then, of course, as you know, many writers, yourself included, who are doing work that will do the same kind of thing for upcoming poets. They will say, “Oh, look, you know, Lauren did this! I could rip off and do that!” You know, I think that’s a part of the torch that we’re passing as we live and write. You hope that what I did, you know, contributes something. I mean, I think about, you know, people with the gigantic names, Terrence Hayes or Tyehimba Jess, or Tracy K. Smith, you know they are gonna leave a huge, bright path for younger writers to begin to engage and so on.
And then of course, we must, you can’t forget, of course, all our predecessors. And when we go back to Gwendolyn Brooks, and even if we move out of poetry, people like Zora Neale Hurston.
I mean, if you read, if you take it seriously, the life of reading, you will find the possibilities infinite, you know? I cannot say enough times: that, if anything, is what has sustained me and what taught me early on as much, as easily, as anything I learned in a workshop. Just seeing what other people could do. Take Georgia Douglas Johnson with “I Want to Die While You Love Me.” I was really young when I read that poem, and I’m thinking, That is very soulful. Even though I had no experience about what it meant to “die while you love me.” I didn’t know what it meant, but it felt so passionate. And I think all the way back, and if you go back as far as you want, you know, go back, you know, to [unsure] or Whitman, or, you know, you keep going back farther and farther, you keep finding this current of passion and a wish to expand what we call our humanity. And I think that’s what I have taken from the people I’ve read and you hope that something you’ve done, like, my work over the years, did some of that for some other people. I mean, if I leave anything, that would be a nice thing to leave: some doors open that other people couldn’t have seen without my efforts. That would be good.
What was your most magical encounter with a poem?
That’s a very complicated question. There are so many poems that I really, really admire. I’ll tell you, the one poet that had an immense effect on me though there are many who did: Ai. Her work in persona, just generally speaking — just the way she could inhabit other figures, be they historical or present or invented. I had never imagined such a thing. I mean, I just didn’t. I remember reading some of those poems thinking she must have known this person or something, because they seem so completely true. And you know, of course, sometimes she’s writing historical poems, and she clearly didn’t know the person. Or like when she wrote that piece with J. Edgar Hoover speaking — I know she didn’t know J. Edgar Hoover — and they just seem utterly convincing. She was someone who really had me by the throat in a lot of ways. I don’t think anyone mistakes me for Ai, but she certainly gave me a window into a set of possibilities in terms of inhabiting other voices that I’m not sure I would have conceived of otherwise. And that’s one bit of magic, of many.
What are your favorite ways to enter the poem or the writing? What is your habit of writing?
Normally, this would be the time of day during which I’d be writing.
Sorry, poems! [Laughs.] I borrowed him!
Oh, believe me, the poems are grateful for a little rest. They’re like “Leave us alone.” [Laughs.] When I really have it together, I try to get up and go to a coffee shop. I have these headphones — not for music — they’re just like the headphones that people who work with power tools use. And I just put them on, which makes everything kind of far away. And even though I can feel people around me, which I really like, I can really hear and think about certain lines. I like to do that first thing in the morning. As I said earlier, what sustains me, of course, is my sense of being in dialogue with so many poets that I love and admire and other writers who are fiction writers and nonfiction writers. But in terms of how I enter the poem, it depends on the day, you know? Some days your mind just seems like it’s just alert in a different kind of way and you think I know there’s something that’s going to happen. And other times I’ll just sit down because I like the idea that maybe I’ll write. If I have one of those days where your mind is just on edge, you know, then something usually just springs onto the page. But other times I don’t have anything that’s driving me to speech, and I just think I’ll just write something. If you’re lucky, something takes and then you begin to push and work and scratch in and scratch out and rewrite it. That’s how I enter.
I love that. Just sit there and hope something happens.
Yes, yes. There are days like that. You just show up.
Thank you so much, Tim.
Thank you.
Read more in this issue: Critical Essay | Poems | Writing Prompt
Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014), Honeyfish (New Issues Press April 2019 & Peepal Tree Press, July 2019), and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2020).
Photo credit: Erica Cavanagh