If this phase of your life was a poem, what would you title it? My grandfather, the first poet in my life, is proud. What do you consider to be your book’s biggest achievement? The poem is absolutely gorgeous and is mind-blowing even on a technical level. That feeling of finally being fully seen and of having a companion in this, so far, fairly solitary experience of hybrid identity also made me cry. In it, he talks about the weirdness of being black and an Arab and how no one ever quite knows what to make of your body in either identity. My friend Charif Shanahan, who is a real-life genius, has a poem in his collection, Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing, called “Asmar,” which he dedicated to me, and that immediately made me cry. What’s the last poem that made you cry, smile, or laugh? Right now I’m really into the idea that countries are man-made and borders are fiction. I’m obsessed with the things people use to identify themselves, especially when oftentimes the stuff we identify ourselves with is kind of fragile and man-made. I’m interested in the limits of what can survive across languages and across cultures. I am most interested in failures of translation-linguistically, culturally, emotionally. What themes do you feel the most powerful writing about? Plus it’s a rush, really, to do something that is out of character for the introvert I actually am. I still edit for sound just as much as I do for diction and believe in saying my poems out loud like I mean what I’m saying. The competition aspect was never super interesting to me, but that training taught me a lot. When I started writing poetry consistently, in high school, the only spaces I saw other young people of color writing poetry was in slam, so I started competing in slams. Performance was more of an acquired taste. Thankfully, I still haven’t lost that feeling. There’s something about reading an amazing book that makes writing seem like the most exciting thing in the world. I’ve always been a reader, and, as a kid, the only thing I really liked were books, so I wanted to write them one day. My poem was about Nausicaa-I’ve been pretty nerdy right from the start. In middle school-I think I was in the sixth or seventh grade-we had an assignment in English class where we were meant to summarize a chapter of The Odyssey as a poem, and a few of those poems were then chosen by the teacher to be read at an assembly on Ancient Greece. What is your first memory of performing poetry? Devour Elhillo’s poems one by one in her gorgeous book, The January Children, published with the University of Nebraska Press in March. Not a fan of on-stage banter, Sudanese (by way of D.C.) poet Safia Elhillo often performs her poems back-to-back, creating beautiful epics that deal with issues like crossing cultures, the illusion of borders, and her love for her homies.
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