Tag Archives: Ashaki Jackson

FPP Interview: Ashaki Jackson

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Ashaki CandidIn her FPP Interview, Ashaki Jackson shares that despite writing on being surveilled and targeted as a Black person in the United States, and how grief for Black Americans feels either “iterative” or “unending,” her parents were still able to create a profound sense of protection for her, and what that meant. Jackson also shares what brought her peace during the pandemic quarantine, and much more.  Read her interview then RSVP to join us virtually on Sunday, April 18, 2021 from 6-8pm to hear Ashaki Jackson read with Ed Baptist, I.S. Jones, Kristin Palm, and Alison Stine.

We met the poems of Surveillance in 2016, and just as police officers have not stopped killing Black people with enduring impunity, your poems have remained as relevant to the moment as anything on tonight’s evening news. How have you been coping with this – our – reality? Do you feel anything has changed since when you first wrote these poems?

I cannot tell if grief is iterative or unending, you know? How does one cope with war? And when I say “war,” I mean that an armed group has been fighting against our existence in this nation for generations. It feels old, and so do I. It ages you. Despite knowing that killing Black Americans is a beloved and protected pastime in this nation, it’s such a worn and evil act antithetical to the All Lives Matter creed. I wrote Surveillance knowing that my work was not new rather it was in the tradition of a police brutality cannon. I wrote fully knowing that at any given time three living generations of Black people and Brown people were stuck in this dark loop of witnessing these deaths and knowing the outcome—grandparents, parents, children all spinning in an intimate, collective memory of violence.

In a 2014 interview, poet Khadijah Queen asked you about coping with distractions to your work and you shared how you found being “swallowed by the mundane” comforting. Examples you gave included “inundating [yourself] with a Big Bang Theory-spring cleaning-pedicure session or reading books in a loud restaurant.” The reading answer made my heart ache for pre-pandemic days, and the relative ease and safety of taking off to sit and read in a crowd, and how that can boost one’s mood and spark creativity.  How have you been coping with the pain and restrictions of the past year?

I’ve found some peace during the pandemic. My full-time position is high stress, and I was relieved to get space from the physical office. I commend the families who sheltered in place and the household leads who managed their personal fears along with those of everyone else in the house. My goodness, what is it like to keep everyone in a household alive and vigilant?! I sat still during the pandemic’s first two seasons. There was such an odd push for normalcy that didn’t feel fair. I shed activities that added more work to my day or didn’t bring me joy. I bought friends’ books to read. I practiced making pralines. I let my hair do what it wanted and took care of my skin since I had the time. I bought a plant that seems to enjoy life and really comfortable pajama sets in which I’ve never invested before. And sometimes I joined friends online. I put meaningful effort into surviving happily.

You have written powerfully about what it’s like to be surveilled not just as a Black person in our society, but as a Black person simply trying to live and be protected in one’s home.  Could you share what “home” means to you now, and how the meaning has possibly changed for you over time?

Home is where my parents reside. That is the first place I knew and understood protection. After the essay you reference was published, my parents shared other instances when we were not safe. They quietly assembled protections for us and refused to let me (as a child, as a teenager, and as a young adult) think I was anything other than protected. Any place that I have lived as an adult, I consider temporary because it is not with my greatest protectors. I’m grateful to all protectors.

You have been an active and committed community leader in the literary arts. What have you learned from this work?

One lesson of many is that publications, activities, and events produced by the literary community come from care. Yes, there are practical and financial reasons for these products, but they are also ways of giving gifts to each other that are long-lasting and memorable. Even curation is an act of care for writers and their audiences.

It’s April 2021.  What gives you hope? What gives you pause?

It took a pandemic to disabuse us of the grind mindset. I am hopeful that we continue prioritizing rest and care for ourselves and others, checking in, protecting personal time. Yes, there are reasons for pause at every turn and life challenges to honor; but I now choose to engage at my pace, to read friends’ books and write for joy. I choose to lean into the wholeness of “no” for self preservation. I get to live a different (better) quality of life.

Announcing the Next Lineup for the First Person Plural Reading Series (Virtual) on Sunday, April 18, 2021!

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Join us virtually on Sunday, April 18, 2021 from 6-8pm for the next reading by the First Person Plural Reading Series featuring Ed Baptist, Ashaki Jackson, I.S. Jones, Kristin Palm, and Alison Stine, hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. Grateful in advance for the fantastic poetry and prose we will hear this night. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. Please RSVP here.

More about the readers:

headshot3Ed Baptist grew up in Durham, North Carolina. He went to DC to attend Georgetown University. One day he was playing pickup basketball in the gym, and John Thompson was watching, but somehow Ed never got an invite to walk-on to the basketball team. So after he received his undergraduate degree he moved on and got his Ph.D. in History at the University of Pennsylvania.  At Cornell, he is Professor in the Department of History.  Together with faculty colleagues from four other universities, Baptist leads Freedom on the Move http://freedomonthemove.org, a collaborative effort to build a crowdsourced database of all North American fugitive slave ads.  The author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, (2014) and Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War (2002), he also co-edited New Studies in the History of American Slavery with the late Stephanie Camp.

BA0A4045-EditDr. Ashaki M. Jackson, a Cave Canem and VONA alumna, is the author of two chapter-length collections — Surveillance (Writ Large Press, 2016) and Language Lesson (Miel, 2016). Currently an Executive Editor at The Offing, she served on the VIDA: Women in Literary Arts Board and mentored for both the PEN USA Emerging Voices program and WriteGirl. Jackson, along with Alyss Dixson and Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, also co-founded Women Who Submit, a national community that supports women and nonbinary writers in submitting their literary works to top tier publications. Readers may find her poetry and essays in Obsidian, 7×7 LA, CURA, Prairie Schooner, Midnight Breakfast, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Bettering American Poetry, among other publications. She earned her MFA (poetry) from Antioch University Los Angeles and her doctorate (social psychology) from Claremont Graduate University.

EDIT-9992I.S. Jones is a queer American Nigerian poet and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart Pulp, The Rumpus, The Offing, Shade Literary Arts, Blood Orange Review and elsewhere. Her work was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at UW–Madison as well as the Inaugural 2019­­–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship recipient. Her chapbook Spells Of My Name is forthcoming with Newfound in 2021.

KPalmHeadshot2018Kristin Palm is the author of a poetry collection, The Straits, and co-editor of Absent but Present: Voices from the Writer’s Block. Her poetry and essays have also appeared in the anthologies The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, To Light a Fire: 20 Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, Kindergarde: Avant-garde Stories, Plays, and Songs for Children and Bay Poetics. As a journalist, she has contributed to numerous publications including The New York Times, Metropolis and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has taught writing in schools and community venues in Detroit and the San Francisco Bay Area. She lives in Detroit, where she is a freelance writer and editor, nonprofit communications director and co-facilitator of the weekly Writer’s Block poetry workshop at Macomb Correctional Facility.

Alison Stine headshot by Ellee AchtenAlison Stine works as a freelance journalist at The New York Times. Her first novel Road Out of Winter, was published in 2020 (MIRA Books/HarperCollins), and is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Ohio Violence (University of North Texas Press). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, and others. Recipient of grants from the NEA, the Ohio Arts Council, NYU Journalism, and National Geographic, she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her next novel Trashlands will be published by MIRA Books/HarperCollins in October 2021.

About the host:

13166004_10154229341507375_8181859589919330252_nStacy Parker Le Melle is the author of Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House (HarperCollins/Ecco), was the lead contributor to Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath (McSweeney’s), and chronicles stories for The Katrina Experience: An Oral History Project. She is a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Nonfiction Literature. Her recent narrative nonfiction has been published in Callaloo, Apogee Journal, The Atlas Review, Cura, Kweli Journal, Nat. Brut, The Nervous Breakdown, The Offing, Phoebe, Silk Road and The Florida Review where the essay was a finalist for the 2014 Editors’ Prize for nonfiction. Originally from Detroit, Le Melle lives in Harlem where she curates the First Person Plural Reading Series. Follow her on Twitter at @stacylemelle.