Will you be at the SLICE Literary Writers’ Conference in Brooklyn this weekend? If so, join FPP curator and co-founder Stacy Parker Le Melle for Listen Up: Literary Innovators Discuss How To Build Community & Craft By Taking A Seat In The Audience. She’ll be speaking with Catapult Contributing Editor Lilly Dancyger, House of SpeakEasy Foundation Executive Director Paul Morris, and PEN America’s Literary Programs and World Voices Festival Producer Lily Philpott. The panel will be moderated by Andrea Kyung Oh. Join us at St. Francis College, 180 Remsen Street at 10:00am! For more info, click here. #SLICELitCon

In the FPP Interview with Apogee Executive Editor Alexandra Watson, who recently won the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing, she tells us about “going downtown” to 125th Street as a child, what it means to lose but also create space for activist-minded writers of color, and more. Come to Silvana on Sunday, April 28th to hear Watson read with Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Jericho Brown, Veronica Liu, Holly Masturzo, and Willie Perdomo. Admission is free. See you at 6pm!

You’ve written about the power of “activist-minded writers and publications who dare to engage identity and social justice through art.” What is the impact you’ve witnessed? What are you personally experiencing? In the 20th century, publications like Opportunity and The Crisis gave voice to black writers who’d been neglected by mainstream publishing. Opportunity is long gone, as is the literature section of The Crisis. Even though I wasn’t around during those times, I feel the loss. And I feel responsible for centering the work, narratives, and perspectives of writers of color, especially those who may not have access to the mainstream literary world. People often ask whether works need to be explicitly political, or explicitly about identity, in order to be published in Apogee. I think that our words and the way we choose to arrange them always gets filtered through identity. The work in Apogee might make that filter more apparent–because the experience of identity is often closer to the surface for writers “on the margins.” Since Apogee started, I sense more of a willingness to engage with that art that makes the lens of identity more visible. That visibility can help us relate to one another in ways that timelines and biographies don’t. Personally, engaging with art–especially the art curated outside of the mainstream–has made me more aware of the many prisms of difference through which we come to language, and more aware of the ways that oppression operates.

Tell us about your Harlem(s). When do you remember first knowing Harlem? I remember walking down 125th Street with my daddy, trying to keep up with his long strides.125th was the farthest south we usually went when I’d visit NYC–he called 125th Street “downtown.” He’d let me sniff and pick out the incense I liked best. Recordings of Malcolm X’s speeches blaring from boomboxes. I remember noticing that I was the lightest-skinned person I could see! This was before the condos and long before Whole Foods.

When do you feel most “we”? When do you feel most “I”? I feel most “we” Thanksgiving, in an overly-heated apartment in the Bronx, with family, with the Classic R&B music channel on, and my aunts have had one too many Korbel mimosas, and one of the men is telling one of the women to fix him a plate, and someone brings out the photo album. I feel most “I” when I’m transferring at Times Square during rush hour.

Who are writers that we should be reading right now? Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, Jean Toomer. Always!

Join us on April 28th at Silvana for what promises to be a very special night featuring writers and exceptional literary citizens Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Jericho Brown, Veronica Liu, Holly Masturzo, Willie Perdomo, and Alexandra Watson. Brown and Perdomo will be celebrating the release of their new books of poems The Tradition and The Crazy Bunch respectively. Word Up Books is our official bookseller for the night. Plan to be with us Sunday, April 28th  at Silvana in Harlem from 6:00pm-8:00pm. 300 W 116th St (SW corner of 116th and Frederick Douglass Blvd). The First Person Plural Reading Series is hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. Admission is free! There will be cake! Here is more information about our stellar readers:

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician and writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, The Millions, Joyland, largehearted boy, Chattahoochee Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, jellyfish review, aaduna and elsewhere, with poetry in Cutthroat, sidereal, Natural Bridge, apt magazine, Hobart, Ithaca Lit, Quiddity and elsewhere. Her poetry and prose juxtapose Hindu epics, other myths and histories, and the survival of sexual harassment and racialized sexual violence by diverse women of color. In addition to the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection prize under which her debut collection White Dancing Elephants was released in October 2018, she recently received a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and a Henfield award for her writing. Her work received several Pushcart Prize anthology nominations this year as well as a Joy Harjo Poetry Contest prize. Follow her on Twitter at @chayab77 including for upcoming readings and events.
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019). His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.

Veronica Liu is a writer and editor, and her writing, comics, photography, and silkscreen prints have been published in Broken Pencil, Quick Fiction, In/Context, Mom Egg Review, We’ll Never Have Paris and other journals and zines. She has been involved in community arts organizing for 24 years, most recently as founder and general coordinator of the 60-person collective that operates Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria in Washington Heights. The cofounder of an online radio station and the community publisher Fractious Press, Veronica has received individual grants for writing, the development of an arts and music fair, a video series, and various publishing projects. Prior to becoming Word Up’s first (and, still, only) paid staff member, she was a contributing editor at Seven Stories Press, where she worked as managing then senior editor for more than a decade.

A recipient of an Established Artist Fellowship from the Houston Arts Alliance, Holly Masturzo’s writing has appeared in Voices of Italian Americana, Ars Medica, Third Mind: Creative Writing & Visual Art, and The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing and has been performed at a variety of sites including museums and on the radio. She is Professor of Humanities and Women’s Studies at Florida State College and serves on the Board of Directors of the Jacksonville Dance Theater.

Willie Perdomo is the author of The Crazy Bunch (Penguin Poets, 2019) The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Poets, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the International Latino Book Award; Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax, 2004), winner of the PEN Open Book Award, and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (Norton, 1996), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, Poetry, Bomb Magazine, and African Voices. He is currently a Lucas Arts Program Literary Fellow and teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Alexandra Watson is the executive editor of Apogee Journal, where she has secured grant funding for community arts projects from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is a full-time Lecturer in the English department at Barnard College. Her fiction, poetry, and interviews have appeared in Nat. Brut., Redivider, PANK, Lit Hub, and Apogee. She’s the recipient of the 2019 PEN/Nora Magid Prize for Literary Magazine editing.

In the second FPP Interview with Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés, who is now the director of the Black Studies Program at City College-CUNY, we talk about her earliest religious experiences, how men and women can find freedom, and what she wished she heard as a young academic, among other topics. Come to Silvana on Sunday, February 17th (today!) to hear Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés read with Amanda Alcántara, Tyehimba Jess, and Jacinda Townsend. Admission is free. See you at 6pm!

In your book Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in America, you examine African religious practices as represented in creative works of Black women of the diaspora. Could you tell us about your first encounters with religion and spirituality? What inspired you to start researching connections between women’s lives, religious practice, and stories told? I grew up Catholic: I attended Catholic schools from first grade to twelfth grade, and participated in Mass as a singer in choir from fifth grade onward and as a reader from seventh grade. I remember my mother teaching me the “Our Father” as a child, and then begin shocked that everybody knew the words when we went to the first Christmas Mass I remember. Religion, and ritual, have been with me from then; the break for me with the Catholic Church began when I realized I could not ascend its hierarchy, that the only place for me would be as a nun. I had begun participating as a singer and as a reader in order to stop boredom that would encroach when I was listening to a priest drone on.

When I went to college, I stopped singing – and had a miserable time. When I returned my second year, I quickly joined the Gospel Choir – and  I felt better again, and understood how intimately I needed prayer in my life, particularly when it was in the form of singing. That was also when I understood the need for developing my spiritual life – for me, while there is some sense of comfort in Catholic ritual, it’s more a sense of muscle memory than it is actual nurturance.

In Gospel Choir I read the Bible for myself, and developed a relationship with it myself; and then began reading mystical texts from other traditions. In graduate school, I wrote a dissertation that reflected my grappling with womanhood and what it would mean for me, what kind of woman I wanted to be, in this society, at this time. Oshun’s Daughters grows out of that – literally I had begun noticing the invocations to nature that these women writers across the hemisphere were doing, and then paid more attention and understood that they were invoking a whole spiritual system that remains outside of Christian understandings of the world, one that would make so much sense to me, to my upbringing as a woman of African descent born to Puerto Rican parents in New York City. These spiritual systems – Lucumí, Vodou, Espiritismo, Obeah, Roots work, Juju – may not be available for public discussion, and yet they have undergirded our Black communities across the hemisphere for centuries, have ensured our survival.

What do these stories teach us about women and resistance? So much knowledge comes from that which cannot be quantified sometimes. Spirit defies logic, defies Descartes’s maxim, I think therefore I am. What if I feel? And I depend on that feeling, that intuition, to guide me? This means trusting myself, my deepest instincts, my needs and wants – all of which goes against a socialization that dictates that women should put everyone ahead of themselves. What does privileging myself mean? And how does that translate to how I care for those around me, for the community I create? These stories show women facing and negotiating with all of those questions.

Where can women find freedom? Where can men?  Both women and men can find freedom in spirit, in love, in light, in each other – it’s something that needs to be actively sought after and cultivated, in a society that seems determined to continue breaking us, mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally. There are the political realities with which we all live – this administration continues in the tradition of the worst that this country offers, in terms of its genocidal impulse, its misogyny and homophobia and transphobia. Words related to racism and systemic racism continue to lose power, as those who offer sustained critique about how all these hatreds work together get lost in the overwhelming noise of the denials and misdirections about who’s a racist, what’s a racist. So we have to dare to love, to allow ourselves moments of joy, to seek peace, to celebrate ourselves and each other, to be grateful for all that is beautiful and positive in our lives. That is our humanity. This country is literally built on reducing all of us to rubble, to dust, to render us machinery to be disposed of – we resist in our everyday insistence on living, in making mistakes and correcting them, asking for and finding forgiveness, in making space for each other, in encouraging each other, giving each other permission to live in the best way we each know how, teaching, learning, together.

What is your language of tenderness? Does this change? I love this question. I try, in every space I enter, to move in love as best I can. Love as praxis. While we often focus in on romantic love when we use that word, I mean everything that comes with it: kindness, gentleness, empathy. Gratitude. Being grateful for someone holding the door open for you – or someone waiving the dollar fine at the library. I smile, and laugh, a great deal, and try as best I can to stay in peace, grounded in myself, in my body. The older I’ve gotten, I realize that I give gifts to people I care about, just cause – it doesn’t have to be anything big, but something that expresses my appreciation for that person. In all realms of my life, I want to make sure I hear people who cross my path, make sure to communicate that I’ve seen and heard them. I don’t always succeed, but I make a valiant effort. Finally, I talk and write words of tenderness – I try to, anyway (smiling).

When did you know you must learn Portuguese? This happened in graduate school – I knew I wanted to be a Latin Americanist rather than a Peninsularist (these were the two large specialties if you were studying Spanish. And I had the good fortune of meeting Earl E. Fitz at Vanderbilt, who said that if I was going to study Latin America that I needed to learn about Brazil in addition to the rest of the continent. Cacilda Rêgo, a carioca who had just finished her dissertation, spoke a Portuguese that sounded like a Caribbean Spanish to my ear – and that was another turning point for me, because I knew that what the regions had in common were large populations of African descent. That began my study of Brazilian literature, history, and culture.

Who is doing interesting research now? I’m really excited by work that I’m blessed to learn about, mostly through social media, quite frankly. Brittney C. Cooper has rightfully gotten attention for her book Eloquent Rage, but her Beyond Respectability is a serious call to action to be more serious in our study of our intellectual Black foremothers. Anne Eller has written a book, We Dream Together, that forces us to reconsider how Dominican history is told, once you shift perspective from the elite living in a capital and pay attention to others around the country, particularly those living closer to the Haitian border. Yomaira Figueroa is doing tremendous work on shifting how we understand Latinx literature and culture by including Equatorial Guinea in the mix as the only country on the African continent colonized by the Spanish, and one about which many people know nothing. I cannot underscore the necessity of Jessica M. Johnson’s work centering the lives and efforts of Black women in freedom struggles in this hemisphere, and the expansiveness of her studies in the digital realm, on Tumbler. Omaris Zamora completed a dissertation and is working on a book emphasizing the role of spirit as an impetus for knowledge production for Black Dominican women, which I’m excited to learn more about. Out on the West Coast Alejandro Villalpando is doing a great deal in making more space for Central American Studies and the afro-indigenous realities of the region – a space which we ignored when I was in graduate school. April J. Mayes continues to do important work honoring Dominican and Haitian history and activism, and is a leader in thinking of the island of Hispaniola transnationally. Closer to home, Jorge J. Rodríguez V is writing on the legacies of the Young Lords here in the New York City. There’s such amazing work out there being created, I’m looking forward to learning more from them.

You’ve recently been named director of the Black Studies Program at City College – CUNY. Tell us about your vision. Two years ago now SUNY Press published my book about Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a man who, among many things, wrote an essay called “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” which has been interpreted by many to be a call for the creation of Black Studies as an academic discipline. I am humbled by the opportunity to carry out this call at The City College of New York, a school that was already the university on the hill in Schomburg’s time and in his neighborhood. More than anything, I want to center our students and assist them in reaching their primary goal of graduating; I want to make that process easier by highlighting all that our school has to offer, i.e. scholarships and fellowships and opportunities that many think are beyond them because they come from working class backgrounds. I want to celebrate our faculty who put in long hours in not only teaching our students but also in mentoring and guiding them, showing them what is possible. And I want to strengthen the school’s relationship with Harlem by bringing attention to the collaborations that already exist between our students and our faculty and all of the Harlems that surround us, river to river, and also by creating programs with our community partners.

I recently heard Brazilian civil rights activist Luana Génot speak of encountering Black Americans who didn’t immediately see the value of engaging across countries, that there’s too many problems here to contend with, but she countered that we can learn from one another.  Do you ever encounter these kinds of attitudes inside or outside of the academy, and if so, how do you respond? I was trained hemispherically, meaning that in my research, I am attending to the details of lives and cultures of more than one geographical site in this hemisphere. This is why the word “diaspora” comes up so often in my work, because our narratives – of migration, exile, enslavement – they bypass national boundaries. Before any nation in this hemisphere claimed us, we were African and of African descent. I recently gave a session at the Schomburg for the Junior Scholars’ 2019 Black Teen Lives Matter – and there I highlighted our long Black histories of activism in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Chile, with mentions of Argentina, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, and Spain. Looking beyond the frames of nation-state allows you to see the similarities of how white supremacy works, and also our histories of dealing with it. We have been here a very long time – this too, all of this, is America.

What words does every young academic of color need to hear? What words did you wish you heard when you started your first research? Find your peoples. Find the people who love you, no matter what — irrespective of what you got on that paper, the hours you’re spending in the library, in the lab. Hold on to them tightly – tell them they mean something to you. Pay attention to those who see more in you than you see in yourself and trust their words. Try to lower the volume on your own fears and doubts and at least look at the path that they are highlighting for you. Celebrate every. single. thing you finish – read that article? A moment’s joy. Underlined something? Prepped that class? Finished that abstract? Submitted it? Dance! Breathe. Take a moment. REST. You are doing this! Focus on all that you are doing and not the list that still needs to get done. Focus on your own abundance. Take care of yourself – if you have to go to therapy, do that. Talk to someone. There’s no shame in this. Don’t feel guilty for being human – for wanting love, sex, to grieve, to feel. Please be happy. It is possible. Be good to yourself, and when you have a chance, pass the baton to the ones coming up behind you.​

In this FPP Interview, Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés let’s us walk down the hallway of her childhood Bronx building, shares how as a Black Puerto Rican woman, Arturo Schomburg’s latinidad and his Blackness were not contradictions for her, how her students–many of them are first-generation or are attending school later in life–give her hope for the future. Hear Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés read tonight, November 18th  from 6-8pm at Silvana in Harlem with Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Tanya Domi, Max S. Gordon, Ruby Shamir, Judith Baumel, and Ricardo Hernandez!

As a child, did you have a sense of connection with others beyond your community? When did you develop consciousness of shared Black history and identity throughout the Americas? I grew up in the Bronx, New York, in the tallest buildings in the borough called Tracey Towers. Our next door neighbor, Mrs. Wasserman, was an older Jewish woman who lived alone; another, Jerry, was a Black woman from Louisiana whose husband, Carl, was such a sharp dresser I thought he came out of the movies. Down the hall lived the Robinsons, who were from Jamaica. I say that to say that my community was *always* diverse. We grew up with salsa and R and B, with Essence magazine and Stevie Wonder and Fats Domino and Marvin Gaye on the radio. Blackness – U.S. Blackness – was never foreign to me. And Caribbean Blackness was never foreign to me – there were elders in the building from the Virgin Islands who always asked for my brother and myself; my best friend in high school, her mother was from Barbados. And whiteness wasn’t distant from me either – my elementary school was predominantly Irish Catholic — with many of the parishioners having just come from Ireland — so I grew up with soda bread and corn beef and cabbage and step dancing and singing for St. Patrick’s Day mass and learning that “County” goes in the front of their landmasses, not after. This was my upbringing. It wasn’t until college that I started to have the language to speak about Blackness in Latin America, despite my parents being darker than me and my brother, despite the rhythms of the music that we listened to and the food we ate, all of which have origins on the African continent.

Your recent publication is the biography Diasphoric Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. So many of us know him for his works that led to the creation of Schomburg Center for Reseach in Black Culture. Tell us why you were attracted to his story, and why you centered his Black-Latinx identity.
It was in college that I learned of Arturo Schomburg, and then it was as a man who had a library named after him that was the premier archive for everything related to Blackness. Oh and incidentally, he was born in Puerto Rico. So as a nerd, as a bookworm who had grown up in this city, I thought this was astounding – how could there be a *library* named after a Puerto Rican, and no one knew? And then I saw a picture of him, and he looked familiar to me, like a family member. So he stayed in my mind as someone who I would research maybe, one day. After my book Oshun’s Daughters, was published, I started thinking about how figures such as Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston had made Vodou more public by including it in their work in the 1930s and 1940s – and I wondered what Mr. Schomburg had to say about that, and so I started reading. And *that’s* when I realized he needed his own book, and realized that part of the issue with him was not that he denied his Puerto Ricanness, but that people in telling his story didn’t know how to integrate it with Blackness — because in Puerto Rico and here, the most prominent Puerto Ricans are white. As a Black Puerto Rican woman, his latinidad and his Blackness were not contradictions for me, and so I set out to write a book that showed how he had been living his afrolatinidad, how everything he did reflected that identity.

How can we break down walls between different Black cultures? One way is to honor and respect the history of African Americans in this country. Toni Morrison once said that anti-Blackness, anti-U.S. Blackness, was a first step to assimilation in this country, and so you find anti U.S. Blackness that is rampant amongst all immigrant communities,  including those from the African continent, the rest of the Americas, and all of the Caribbeans, who many think should “know better.” The reality is that every fight we fight to make these United States a more perfect union builds on fights, legal challenges, civic organizations, secret societies, all launched by U.S. Black men, women, and children. There are no civil rights without first learning and understanding U.S. Black history, and from there learning how the rest of us — Latinx, Asians, gay — how we all build from them.

Who does good work in teaching from the whole diaspora? For me, there is no good work about the whole diaspora without talking about South America and the Hispanic Caribbean. I am tired of seeing work labelled as diasporic and then I see all English-speaking countries and intellectuals represented. Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo was the first person I read who looked at Haiti and its impact on Black populations in the US and Cuba — that was the first time I had seen that grouping, when doing research on Mr. Schomburg. Myriam J.A. Chancy wrote a book on Dominican, Haitian, and Cuban women’s literature, and again, I was struck by that grouping, because it is so rare. Both of them paired Haiti with the Hispanic Caribbean – that was striking to me. For me, actually representing how Black peoples in this hemisphere have lived and produced culture, that is my own goal with regards to my work. There’s so much that needs to be done, that requires studying multiple languages and multiple national histories, but we can do it. Mr. Schomburg himself was doing it. Ntozake Shange, may she rest in peace, she was doing it.

Where is consciousness developing? How can we nurture these connections?
Social media is a space where consciousness is rising, where people are sharing information and learning new things at their fingertips. There are people who have never physically met me or sit in my class, but who may know me from Twitter and then who read my books. Social media is a tremendous advance in terms of the dissemination of information for which people are longing.

It’s 2018. What gives you hope? What gives you pause? My students give me hope – every day I see men and women who are changing their lives. Many are first generation college students; some are non-traditional students who have come back to college in their 30, 40s, and 50, who are making a way for their children. I am inspired by them every single day.

Cynicism gives me pause. Hopelessness gives me pause. On a daily basis, I meet with men and women who have been homeless, or who don’t have food at home, don’t know where their next MetroCard is going to come from, but they hold on to the promise that a college degree is going to mean something in their lives. And they are there, working to get to school. And then I meet PhDs who belittle the lives of these students because they don’t take the time to get to know them. Arrogance gives me pause.

What American crisis keeps you up at night? Hopelessness and willful ignorance, when I think about them too long, can keep me up. White supremacy is embedded in the very fabric of this nation, and it counts on people not being interested in history. This has been the case since enslavement, when it was illegal to teach enslaved peoples to read — which is why literacy is freedom. Education is freedom. Everything that we’re seeing counts on people deliberately applying different standards to white men and women and choosing to uphold white supremacy when they do it. That hypocrisy is more and more apparent – and people are also talking in ways about race and class and sexuality in this country in ways that haven’t been seen in a few decades – which makes me hopeful.

Is there a piece of writing– yours or someone else’s–that really speaks to your experiences these days? I love writers’ essays, particularly those pieces that are beautifully written. Audre Lorde‘s Sister Outsider – I come back to those essays. And every time I see a Lucille Clifton poem, I realize I need to read more of her work.

When do you feel most “we”? When do you feel most “I”? If I’m doing it right, my day, I mean, I feel “we” most of the time. We really are in this together, all of us – trans rights and immigrant children being separated from their parents and voter suppression and the caravan and religious intolerance and DACA — it affects every single one of us. “I” feels like disconnection – like an inculcation of this individualistic ethos that is at the base of the KoolAid we all drink. Growing up, I was taught to be of service to my larger communities – the way I teach, the pieces I write, the histories and literatures I highlight are all meant to illuminate the larger “we.”

Tell us about your Harlem. My Harlem is all of the Harlems – I currently live in Central Harlem, and walk west and there’s Washington Heights and walk east and there’s East Harlem. I love walking these spaces, and passing Little Senegal, and seeing all of our multiple communities.

What was your first knowledge of Harlem? My father was born in El Barrio; my mother, when she came from Puerto Rico with her aunt and uncle, first lived in Loisaida for a brief time before moving up to El Barrio. But I grew up with Showtime at the Apollo being on TV on Saturday night at 1am after SNL – 125th street was a storied street. I can’t remember when I didn’t know about Harlem.

Who are writers that we should be reading right now?
Elizabeth Acevedo and Kiese Laymon and Imani Perry and Hanif Abdurraqib and Alexander Chee and Joel Leon and Peggy Robles Alvarado and Jesmyn Ward and Vanessa Mártir and Marjua Estévez and Walter Thompson Hernández and José Olivarez and Eve Ewing and Ashley Ford and Naiomy Guerrero and Roxane Gay and Nicole Chung and Celeste Ng and Daniel J. Older and Nayyirah Waheed. This is my U.S. American literature.

What advice would you give emerging writers today? Read broadly and widely – and please, please be kind to yourselves. There are all these rules out there- write every day, write in the morning, write 1000 words a day. Trust *your* rhythm. Trust *your* process. It may not look like anyone else’s. We’re all making it up as we go… and it may look differently, depending on the project. And everything counts as writing — taking notes counts, sometimes checking email counts, walking your dog as something comes together counts. Reading and letting it marinate counts. Walking in the Botanical Garden counts. Be kind, be gentle to yourself.

Talking to poet, professor, and translator Judith Baumel about politics is as gratifying as it is about poetics. In our FPP Interview, Baumel speaks of coping with American politics at home and abroad and what gives her hope. She speaks of her Italian year abroad and what her Adelphi University students – Baumel was the founding director of the MFA program – teach her each year. Hear Judith Baumel read this Sunday, November 18th from 6-8pm at Silvana in Harlem with Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Tanya Domi, Max S. Gordon, Ruby Shamir, Vanessa K. Valdés, and Ricardo Hernandez!

You were the founding director of a creative writing program (Adelphi University) what did the administration of this program teach you about writing and creativity? Ha! That it’s near-impossible to protect one’s time for writing and creativity. Cut that. Here’s another answer. Also true. So much of getting things done in the world involves presenting a narrative. Every step of building and nurturing the MFA program called on my core strength as a writer.

What have you learned from your students? My students bring me new music and new film and new art to know. They bring new literature that moves them. They also bring new ways to read old literature. They help me not be a fixed person.

Let’s talk about Italy. How did it feel to stay? How did it feel to return to the US? I translate Italian poetry and travel around Italy frequently. It’s my happy place. It felt selfish to spend my sabbatical there alone (I left behind my husband, my grown children, my 87year old mother) but I decided to be selfish. This was the first extended period in which I dedicated my life to nothing other than my own writing. The Italian pace of life is ideal for me. I woke up late, made a coffee, wrote in bed for a few hours, cooked myself a nice lunch, took a walk, read a lot, had aperitivi with friends, maybe some dinner, went to bed and started it all over the next day. I even managed a version of this schedule during the semester I taught at the University of Genoa. Heaven.

Coming back was a shock.

In Italy I cut back on my consumption of television and radio. This gave me a break from my tendency – my addiction – to ride the 24 hour news cycle. So I avoided the daily despair that comes from listening to the latest outrage and assault to our democracy, our culture, our language.

You write profoundly about politics, especially progressive politics. What gives you hope? What gives you pause? Thanks!  What gives me hope are the many many many young people who are building a new political road. Who are walking door to door. Who are marching. I streamed “March for Our Lives” while in Italy and after about ten minutes I was blubbering with gratitude for these strong and smart kids. This week we are beginning to see the real results of the midterm elections and I hope the new, independent, fierce people who won in local and down-ballot races will bring lasting change.

What gives me pause is the extreme discourse of nationalism, the extreme divisions that still prevail. When mainstream Democrats “reach across the aisle” it seems they want to demonstrate that they have principles of comity, etc. But I fear that is not the right way. Writer Aleksander Hemon just published a great essay called “Fascism is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight.” More and more I’m understanding Red State/Blue State divide as referencing a division between rural and urban communities. This means the areas have fundamentally different and perhaps opposing economic needs. Nothing new in our country. This was the situation at the Continental Congress. I’m in the middle of Andrew Delbanco’s new book The War Before The War. It’s about the Fugitive Slave Act and is a cautionary tale for our time.

Is there a piece of writing– yours or someone else’s–that really speaks to your experiences these days? American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes. Riveting. Brilliant. Wild. Heartfelt. After the 2016 election Hayes started writing a poem every day. Collectively, they are a response to the indignities, the ambiguities, the heartbreak, the threats, the violence of our time. They don’t hold back. They speak truth clearly. But they refuse to be fixed.  The book is the kind of writing that Walt Whitman called “barbaric yawps” of the ordinary citizen.

What should the future be? If you let me talk about the future as being (not Michelle Obama style becoming) it’s easy. The future is a country in which every person can vote and every person’s vote counts. In which Black Lives Matter. In which spending to protect the environment matters. In which distributive justice prevails. A country with zero automatic weapons. A country whose highest goal is to love the stranger (the refugee and the immigrant) and the widow and the orphan (the least among us) as ourselves, as the Torah tells us. I do not have a plan to get us from here to there, alas.

Tell us about your Harlem. My Harlem is a literary place. It runs east to west from Piri Thomas to Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison all the way to Marcus Garvey’s pier for the Black Star Line. It’s also a place with a street life that is fun, though as a Bronx girl, I don’t spend as much time in Harlem as I do uptown.

What was your first knowledge of Harlem? My uncle and my father taught at City College. As a kid I visited what felt like a shining city on the hill of Convent Avenue. It was and still is the best of America, of New York. Where an immigrant kid can get a first rate education on a beautiful, aspirational campus. Later I also taught at City College and loved wandering the nearby streets, the Dominican bakeries on Broadway, the houses on Striver’s Row.

Who are writers that we should be reading right now? Recent must-read poetry books: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. Erika Meitner’s book Holy Moly Carry Me. Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. I’m proud to be in an anthology called Women Of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism edited by two friends and former students Danielle Barnhart and Iris Mahan. It’s radical and intersectional.

What advice would you give emerging writers today? Read as much and as widely as you can. Write as much as you can. And follow the cartoonist and writer Lynda Barry’s advice. Do not ever ask yourself these two questions: Is it good? Does it suck?

Is there something I didn’t ask you that you’d like to share?

Nah