by Lauren K. Alleyne 

Mahogany L. Browne is a poet of the people. From her work as the host of the renowned Nuyorican Friday Night slam, to her work with public-facing poetry spaces like the Bowery Poetry Club, Urban Word, to her recent position as the inaugural poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center, she has literally and figuratively made space for a plurality of voices in the poetry world. In particular, Black voices and voices of color.  

Within Browne’s own poems, too, the collective is both ever-present and essential. In This is the Honey, published in Poetry in 2021, for example, Browne celebrates a communal “we” that leans in immediately to include the reader as part of the collective. Thusly swept into the poem, “we lean forward” and succumb to a collective music that references but decenters struggle and lifts up collective joy. Labor and voice metonymized as ‘hands and throats” create “a jubilee of a people dreaming wildly / despite the dirt.”  The poem posits the transformative nature of art that “births change” invoking a collective dance—both joy and movement—that “holds our names!” In another nod to collective history, the poem brings in generations—“grandparents,” “sons,” daughters, children—that form a “familial tree / Rooted in miraculous possibilities / & alive.” 

At the same time, Browne’s poems are deeply rooted in the way that communal experiences of Blackness, of womanhood, of Americanness bring their collective heft to bear upon the individual. Her poem “The 19th Amendment & My Mama” is a masterclass, demonstrating the porosity of the “I” as it holds the mother’s history alongside its own, as well as the weight of the current political moment in which everything they share (womanness, Blackness, an urge to forget) and everything between them (addiction, illness, distance), is held in the same thrall. 

Deftly weaving the individual narrative of the contemporary I, the mother’s history and  invoking the historical women suffragettes “Ida & Susan & Lucretia & Elizabeth Cady” Browne knits a collective in the poem that can help face the “the pain / of a world breaking its own heart.”  

Ultimately, Browne’s poetics and praxis are grounded in the urgent knowledge that individual and collective (well)being are intertwined, and that in that nexus lies the truest possibility of liberation. 

In March of 2024, Mahogany L. Browne visited the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and spoke to Lauren K. Alleyne, the Executive Director of Furious Flower. The interview, transcribed below, has been edited for clarity and length.

Welcome to JMU, welcome to The Fight & The Fiddle. This is the journal of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and we focus on one amazing Black poet every quarter. And so, this is you, Mo.

It’s me! What an honor. Thank you.

Absolutely. I want to start with finding out what was your gateway poem, what was the thing that sparked you and set you onto this poetry life?

I would have to say my gateway poem was fourth grade, James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation.” I memorized it for an oratory competition–I did it fourth and fifth grade, the same poem. The first year, I think we were in second place. The second year we won. But obviously I had time to rehearse, but that was my first realization, like, Oh, this is magic. This is something. It was leading into high school, and I was then introduced to the Renaissance. And you know, all of those poets, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes; I was introduced to the writing, and then we were asked to recreate a classic. The classic was Dante’s Inferno, but we were to do it with a contemporary voice. I didn’t know it then, but it was a found poem. I’m finding poetry that already exists. And I thought, N.W.A., they were poets, and they felt like they were talking about Dante’s Inferno in their raps. That was my merge, and my AP Lit professor said “Absolutely not. If you don’t turn in another paper with a different source, you will flunk,” because she did not deem N.W.A poetry. And so I quit. I quit looking at poetry. I stopped believing in it. I just let it go for about five years. And so, the next time I came back to it, I was a mother. My daughter was born when I was twenty-one, and poetry was the one place that I found my voice again, like I couldn’t finish all of the stories that I was trying to write. I was into journalism, but poetry was that, you know, it’s an amuse-bouche. It’s a moment that you get to just write down and let that moment live so that you can breathe easier. And that’s when I return to it.

That that leaving of poetry sort of that comes from folks having ideas about what poems are, what they aren’t, what they should and shouldn’t be. How do you navigate? How do you define the poem?

I think it changes, right? Because who I was 10 years ago and what I thought poetry was then has absolutely been more refined and sharpened. I still believe it is the people’s voice. It is the observer’s eye. It is the love song to the moment, and it is about self-expression. So teaching [students] through New York City school systems for fifteen years, I went in looking like people that grew up with them or were raising them or lived in their neighborhoods, so it was easier for them to hear me challenge them, rather than feel berated when I said, “No, no, it’s not about if it’s a poem or not. It’s about are you telling the truth or not?” And that that was the nucleus for me: if I just had a place to tell the truth for my own self, that would be the poem. And I think that that has remained the one consistent thing to me about what a poem is. But a poem can be many things. A poem can exist in breath. A poem can exist in food. You know, we were driving here, and every sentence driving with this woman [Lauren], every sentence out of her breath, [out of] her mouth is poetic, right? And I live like that, but it’s a rarity that you see it reflected. So, it was very welcoming and warming, but also a reminder that we are living poetry.

What are the biggest challenges to teaching poetry for you, and what are the strategies you found across all of these spaces to bring students into poetry? What are some of the ways that you do you encounter that, and what are some of the ways you’d get across

I think the most difficult classrooms have always been the classrooms where the poetry was the punishment. That’s the hardest one. You know, they’re like, [sarcastically] “Oh, here she comes, the poet, great!” And it doesn’t matter how many Hip Hop lyrics you know, it doesn’t matter how cool your kicks is. If it’s a punishment, you treat it as such. So that is the hardest space to try and introduce poetry to young people. And I’ve taught everywhere from senior citizen homes to group homes for teenage pregnant mothers, to alternative prison programs, to prison, to middle school, kindergarten, and the one thing I realized is poetry is most magical when there is no judgment attached. The reason why they don’t want to, is the same reason that I stopped. Someone told them somewhere in their lifetime that what they were doing wasn’t enough. If I come and say all bets are off, there is no judgment here. I usually say the only bad poem you can write is the one with the blank page. Don’t give me no blank page. I’m not sitting up here for twenty minutes having a discussion. We’re not doing that, right? I’m not here to lecture you. I’m here to grow with you. And if you don’t see that as an opportunity to grow together, cool beans, but that’s the wackiness. I think you are amazing. Whatever you do, whatever you write, we will make it a poem. We will find the poetry in it. But if you give me a blank page, you didn’t even try, right? And so that’s when it’s bad for me. And that has been literally the equalizer for every room. I come in super honest, as transparent as possible, and as me as possible, and just say, “Let’s find a way into a poem.” Sometimes they say, “I don’t like poetry, and I get it,” so I ask, “Well, have you ever written a Facebook status, a tweet, a love letter? Have you written a song? Oh, you don’t like songs? Sure. Sure, sure. Did you write an angry email? Pull that out.” And that’s when they realized, “Oh, because it’s just language, right?” The poetry is the language, and we can find the moments in the language where poetry can exist, and we can extrapolate that and flesh it out and see what grows.

Your work is very socially engaged. You said that poetry is the people’s voice, and that’s a duality folks love to talk about, social politics, poetry. But my question to you is not really about that as a duality; I’m interested in your own poetics of social engagement. How would you define or describe what it means to come to the page with that “people’s voice,” with that socially engaged lens? And how does it impact your practice? How does it shape your practice? How is it the practice?

I remember there was an argument years ago in the poetry universe, where it was like, Poetry shouldn’t be political! It should be yours! I don’t have that right. I don’t have that privilege. When I walk outside, I am a Black woman, and all the things that come with being a Black woman in this United States of Amerikkka is constantly charged with the politic—one of survival, one of oppression and one of historical background that I know that there has been fighting done already. I can just look back at June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni. I can look back at Mary Evans, Maya Angelou. I can look back and say, “What happened? Okay, this has already been said, because you’re trying to gaslight me.” I don’t have the privilege of splitting hairs and saying my poems are just about this, because even the way I look at nature is politically charged, even the way I look at love is politically charged. I don’t know if my man is coming home because he is a Black man, right? That is a fear that I have to grapple with every breath, every minute. I try to be cognizant of it and not play myself, not pretend it’s not a thing. I’ve been to like beautiful natured settings, Hedgebrook in Washington, amazing residency by women, for women. And even the lumber that you put into your fireplace is cut by women–it’s a beautiful concept–but even that is political and blessed be the fruit that I get to sit there in, the bounty of these women fighting against what has been told to us as place and gender norm, and push back against it. Even in my nature spaces, a woman made it possible, and then all the history of why that is absolutely the most amazing, breathtaking thing.

I went to a great residency in Wyoming. Super, super amazing Ucross space, and I was followed by someone from an adjoining town to my front driveway, and [they] just watched. That was political, right? Because why are you following me and terrifying me? And the directors knew it. The director was like, “No, no, you come stay closer with us. We’re gonna figure out what’s going on.” Political! And I’m here to write poems. I just went to the grocery store to get some fruit because when you write, you’re like, I just need the thing so I don’t think about the things that I need, and then you become obsessed with what you don’t have, rather than just focus on writing. Even then, a moment where I’m just supposed to be focused on writing—I was finishing my first book, my first fiction—and I couldn’t even take one page and get it done, because I was grappling with, you know, the racism and the fear of, are you okay? and what does this mean for me? And like, Damn, why don’t I get to just write? And the poems happened, but that story that I thought I was there to write, did not. So, I’m constantly having a tug of war with the politics, because my actual body, is a politic.

I want to go to this idea of communities and residencies, since you’ve been in those spaces. I want to hear about the role of community in your practice. We always think writing is so solitary, but we also know that it’s also made in community. So, talk about the impact and of community.

I feel like I’m a communal artist, for sure. My best work, I realized, was coming out of the breeding space of Cave Canem a week-long intensive workshop where I get to meet fifty other poets, and I get to work with these esteemed poets in practice. No matter where I go, if there isn’t that opportunity to tap in with another artist or a community member—because like I said, I feel like poetry is everywhere—and because I’m a communal poet, I need to make sure the work that I’m doing resonates beyond this vessel. We can get very myopic, and that’s great for whoever can practice it that way, but I don’t move that way. I don’t live that way. Everything I do, I’m thinking about how it’s going to translate, how it’s going to transfer information, and will it be okay when it gets to the other side? Will I be misconstrued? Will I be misunderstood? And that’s my only hope. So, working with other artists and working alongside other voices is extremely important to me, because it keeps me out of the comfort of the vacuum. You know that small space of just other poets and we say things and we love it, but if you go into the community, they’re like, “What are you saying, what does that mean?” And that’s one of the takeaways that I give to students is “This poem is great. That’s awesome. You wrote a poem that looks good on paper, but so what? What does it mean? What is it going to do?” And if you say, “Well, it’s going to save me, because I got it off my chest,” cool beans, but can I get this same kind of salvation when I read that? Because if I don’t find the salvation that you thought you were putting on that page, who is this poem for? And if they say “For me!” then [I say] leave it in your journal, baby. Because if it’s the poem, how do we how do we have access to it? How do we learn from it. How do we have a discussion with it? And if it is just the art piece that you want to be witnessed and you don’t want to talk about, I’m certain there’s a space for that. I don’t know where it is, and I definitely am not trying to visit.

I think the biggest leap in our humanity is when we are grappling with the hardest questions, the hardest moments of life, but together, like in conversation, and if you’re having the conversation solo dolo, I’m sure that’s great. Plenty of artists are just making the art that they want to make for them, but that’s just not my ministry. That’s not my path.

What’s been your most unexpected teacher? What or who in this poetry life?

I think it’s a toss-up between the internet and shame. Them some hard teachers right there! The Internet never lets you forget. It’s quick to cut you down and cancel you. It’s also a beautiful space to build you up. I just think the internet is, you know, one of those tools where you get to see the larger world close up. So it really is just a lens. And shame, in that, what we allow ourselves to write–and when we’re able to talk about why we wrote it, or why we couldn’t write it, I think those two are equally hard professors for me. I’m writing my first full-length, Red Bone, which was nominated for the NAACP [Image Awards]. It was founded by the shame of me losing contact with my mother, who is a recovering addict, and my father, who’s been a victim of the incarceration system all of my life. Not being able to say, “he’s been in prison all my life,” not being able to say “she suffered from drug addiction.” What does that mean about me? If these are my parents, what do you think about me? And then interviewing my mom about the love that she had for my father, because I never saw it, and I knew that the way I was behaving in the world was a response to what I didn’t see. That broke open the shell of shame for me, because it was no longer a me versus them, or me trying to make people think better of me despite what I thought of these humans who made me suffer;they both suffered from the hands of inequity and oppression. And like any survivor, you do what it takes to keep the self alive, even if the soul is not being fed. So, to be in prison all of my life, he’s institutionalized by nature of being a Black man in America. Even having conversations with different journalists, they were like, “Well, what did he do?” And I said: “He was Black. He was a man. He was poor. That’s what he did.” He did that and then succumbed to the practice of trying not to be Black, and poor, and addicted. Those were what was really key for me, using that page to lessen the blows and also humanize my parents. Find forgiveness for them and what I thought they did wrong. Kids be thinking it up! I thought I knew, and then I did these interviews, and I was like, Oh, you just did your best. And even now, when I make a mistake, I’ll say, “I’m sorry, I did my best.”And that’s so hard, because it’s not just an apology, but it’s an acceptance of grace. I’m not showing up the way that I normally would, or I wish I could, and I hope you can see that I tried. I’ll do better if given the chance.

You have other jobs besides poetry, a couple. You’re an ED of a media literacy org, you founded Diverse Lit. You say they’re informed by your work as a writer as well, and so I would love to hear about these other worlds you inhabit and how they intersect with or influence your intention with your writing.

I’m the former ED of Just Media, which is a media literacy campaign/initiative looking at the ways in which we use storytelling through film, media, and art to talk about incarceration and the criminal legal system and the impact of that. Which is very much tied to the shame that I was holding in respect to my father being incarcerated. I took on that job after finishing my book-length poem, “I Remember Death by its Proximity to What I Love,” which is all about the impact of incarceration on the women and children who are left behind. So that’s how it informed me—a lot of the research that goes into making sure these films have discussion guides, and they’re happening not just in the same sector where the punishment is happening, but in film making, in cultural centers, in community centers, in churches. How do you disseminate that information? So that’s how it informed that.

I’m also the poet in residence at Lincoln Center, and that’s all about curating, which is very much tied to the work that I started at Nuyorican. I was there for thirteen or fourteen years, coaching, curating, hosting the poetry program, the Friday night slam, and it was time to just move on. Because, like all things you know, you can outgrow a space, you can outgrow the vision. And moving on just to work on my own work. And I missed curating. So, when the Lincoln Center programming department reached out to me, it was like, oh, that’s what I miss! I love writing. I love being able to write and just work on my writing, because fourteen years of my life was dedicated to other people’s art, their careers, their movement, reference letters for them to get into school, getting them into school, babysitting–I’ve done it all, because I believe that that is what real community is. It is not just “I’ll look at your poem,” it’s “I’ll take care of your heart and your path.” And I didn’t have that sense it wasn’t reciprocal, because in that space, no one saw me as someone in need. They only saw me as someone they needed something from. And Lincoln Center became a great bridge for me, because it’s both me bringing folks who have never been able to perform at this amazing space; me bringing community who have never felt welcome; and me telling them what I need as an artist to continue. So, if that’s “Okay, Mo wants to work on a podcast? Let’s support that. Okay, Mo is doing a poetry festival? How can we support that?” This is no longer the digital panhandling, shaking the can. As nonprofits, it is a constant We need help. We need help. We need help. It doesn’t matter that the art is saving the people. It doesn’t matter what our opus is, that is not necessarily the concern. The reason that we are able to do that is because there’s somebody on the back end always asking for help. And to be that person that does both? It’s exhausting. As you know, it’s exhausting. When do you have time to eat, to dream, to build within? It’s very difficult. And I think that may be why I’m a communal artist as well, because I realized I couldn’t do that, so then my personhood became a part of that community, which I still love, which I still am really thankful for, because I found a path. I found a path that I can live with, that I can learn from, and that I’m not… depleted? I’m not depleted. I’m not! And when I need a break, I get to say, “Oh, I need a break.” I hosted almost twenty shows. I might have did too much, and I have someone looking out for me, saying, “I think you did too much. Let’s bring it down. You need a residency?” One of my residencies came from Lincoln Center, saying, “Do you need space to go work?” I’ve never had that. I’ve never had the place that I’m working look back and say, “You look like you’re doing too much, and that your art isn’t being taken care of. Your shine is different. Your glow is different. You look like you’re holding on. How can we help?” So, it was a great journey to find the balance. That’s the second job.

What else do I do? Black Girl Magic Ball. I’m the founder of Black Girl Magic Ball. Which is… exactly what I said. It started out as a book release party, but because I think community and I’m like, “I don’t just want to celebrate my book. I want to celebrate the Black women to make this possible.” And they’re everywhere. They’re doctors, they’re actors, they’re activists, they’re dancers, choreographers, producers. We’re now in our seventh year. This year [2024] we celebrate Hope Boykin; Olayemi Olurin, the lawyer and activist; Amanda Seales, the poet, artist and activist; Toi Derricotte, founder of Cave Canem; and Fred[erick] T. Joseph as an ally. It’s our second year giving an ally award to someone who’s out in the world, because I wanted to do that, I had to look outside too, and I didn’t want to focus on the outside, but just say thank you, because it’s not alone that we make this work happen. And Dr Bettina Love. It’s really a great opportunity to keep loving us, you know, keeping us in the center. And when I say “us,” I mean Black women.

And finally Woke Baby Book Fair. It’s also one of those initiatives that came from my book being released. I wasn’t really interested in just having a release party and reading books and buying books for kids, but other diverse titles. Where are those? Let’s have them all together. And as a kid who grew up with the Scholastic Book Fair and I could not afford said books, you remember them? It was comparable to the Sears Christmas Guide, you know, where you just look at the book of what you want. That was with books, though. And so, this is a nod at that, with a very specific focus on diverse stories. We’ve had everyone from Jason Reynolds come and read, Dhonielle Clayton, José Olivarez, so we mix in the poets with the children lit authors. And it’s just been really magical.

I’m interested, because you’ve written for multiple ages, what’s it like to translate? What do you think is fundamental to like these different levels of audience?

It actually was harder than I anticipated. I had no idea. Starting as a poet, writing and teaching, I was doing my own work and just being in younger audience spaces. But then Jason Reynolds said, “You should think about YA,” and I was like, “Absolutely not. I curse too much. It’s not going to work. I see them cringe when I’m on stage, what do you think they’re going to do when that book is in the library? No, it’s not going to work.” And he said, “I think you’re wrong. Just try it.” And lo and behold, he was right. And I love it! Because the things that I wish I had access to, I’m now giving the young people access to. So Woke Baby exists very much in the vein with like Honey, I Love and I Love My Hair!, and I just love those books. I just wanted a book that could sit amongst the greats and have our young-Black-people faces on the cover too.

And just thinking about just the idea that this baby is so woke, so revolutionary, right? Because newborns really are the first revolutionaries. They don’t care! I don’t care what you’re talking about. “I’m hungry.” “I need to be changed.” “I need you to shut up.” Like, “I will shut this party down,” right? And I thought that’s so funny, this baby’s woke already. And in the filters of how you learn to be an adult in the world is what changes it. But look at them yelling for what they want. Look at them reaching for what is theirs. Look at them! So that was the Woke Baby and then Woke happened as a companion and bigger sibling book. It is an anthology of poems that I created alongside Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood. The idea was just to have poems that were the building blocks of what it means to be a global citizen. So, looking at allyship, looking at protest and resourcefulness, looking at volunteering, what it means to be woke, and putting all of those into language that’s accessible for twelve years old and younger–which I found was probably the hardest thing. I can go out into the world and say “heartbreak is like two buildings crashing and falling down in my chest,” and historically, the adults who were alive or aware enough to remember 9/11, happening can use that moment; they can tie it right to it on their own, without me saying it. Whereas young people are like “What’s that mean? What is racism?” How do I say racism in twelve-year-old? Racism is someone deciding that who you are, by how you look, is not worth a smile, is not worth a hug, is not worth a hello. And they’re like, “Ah, got it.” So, I did have to peel back those layers to figure out what we’re actually trying to say, because we are so shrouded in the beauty of language that we’re actually running away from the heat of the truth.

I’m also curious about the genre shifts between poetry and fiction. What’s that like? as somebody who does not fiction?

Yeah, it’s a lot of words, it’s actually more lonely than poetry, which is why I think I’ve had such a hard time as of late. I’m doing it with deep breaths, prayer, coffee (sometimes whiskey), but it’s hard. I love the workshop space, and again, that communal space pushes me to engage with an audience that is already here. Whereas the fiction? I had to build a world, and I built it, and it’s wild, it’s beautiful, but it was really difficult. My first YA novel in verse? Never have I ever, all right? And I did it, and then I turned that into a play that Steppenwolf auctioned and put up in Chicago, which was amazing and also not what I anticipated. But when they auctioned the book, they said, “We’ll get a playwright for you,” and I said, “No, I’ll do it.” Because not only do I want to know exactly what is being said for my characters, but I want to be a part of that learning, the making, and then I did a 10-episode treatment for a Netflix series. So, I’ve done every genre because poetry touches everything, and I’d rather be genre-bending than genre-fixed. My work can go everywhere. So that book-length poem is also because those sections that I wrote did not—could not—exist in the essays that I was writing. The novel in verse started out as a poem. That one poem about “me and Lily ain’t talking because ‘She must think she cute! Must think I ain’t!’” became “me and Lay Li ain’t talking, and this is the whole summer that happened.” So, I love it, and I’m willing to be a student to it. I think that that is my one blessing is that I’m not bound.

And finally, what’s next?

What’s today? [Laughs.] So, Chrome Valley, the last book that just came out, a book of poems that came out with Liveright Norton received the Patterson prize, which is my first award, eow! But we also created an album. So it is, right now, about to be dropped, April 19 [2024], and it is a blues jazz libretto. The poems from the book have been scored and turned into song. Alongside Sean Mason and these beautiful singers, bass players, drummers, I think we had a trumpet? It’s an orchestra. It’s an orchestra of “Hello, Hallelujah, Holla Back.” It’s so good. And not because it’s mine, but because it’s good. It pushes what we think about poetry. When I say poetry is everywhere, baby, I’m telling you that joint is so good. It’s so good, and it doesn’t… It scared me because I thought, Oh, people think I’m just making a Grammy album. I already tried to do that. I made an album with just poems and music before, and I loved the experience with Max Michael Jacob; it was the presentation, an experimental presentation of “I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love,” but this is different as it’s been scored. We filmed the whole process. We made it vinyl. It’s properly dropping an album. So that is what’s next. I’m excited.

And I think what makes it possible for me to do so much is that I’m willing to collaborate. I’m not one of those artists who are like, “I have to do it all.” No, I have to do it, but I’m willing to learn. I can be an apprentice. And Sean Mason is a young, masterful genius. I watched him play the piano while me, him, and Maya Abney were in South Carolina, Gullah Geechee islands, doing a project. He just started playing on this keyboard, and we were in a museum, and the keyboard was breaking down, and I just thought, It’s not gonna work, and all of a sudden, he just started. It was like a juke joint came alive. And I thought, I want him to see my poems. I want to see what he thinks about them. And that’s how these opportunities grow, because I’m willing to say, “I wrote this poem. Can you respond with your art?” “I wrote this poem. How do I turn it into a play?” “I wrote this poem. Can we make a film out of this?” And I just want that one poem to continue rippling. Our poetry is everywhere. What if we took it everywhere? Then no one can tell us no. Unbound poetry.

On that expansive, possibility-filled note, thank you so much for talking with me. Thank you for being here with me.

Read more in this issue: Critical Essay | Poems | Writing Prompt

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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