By Sequoia Maner
I think back to all the small moments of intimacy and connection, moments formative to the shaping of my professor self.
I debuted a contrapuntal poem with Evie Shockley in the room, a flexing of my will toward poetic mastery witnessed by the master herself. I'll never not follow in Shockley's wake. I talked the contours of beingness with Kevin Quashie in our dormitory living room over Chinese takeout. When he dropped Black Aliveness and reoriented an entire discipline of black studies toward alternate worldmaking, I was not surprised; rather, I was humbled to have witnessed a small bloom of his canonicity. I stumbled across trauma yet-to-be-healed during a creative-critical workshop facilitated by Meta DuEwa Jones. Since then, I have dug deep to unearth remnants left by motherlessness and I am working on a full length poetry collection about the child welfare system in the United States, giving voice to those left scarred and bereft.
That is to say, I would not be the writer I am today nor the writer that I am always becoming without the NEH institute "Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement." Following the institute, I published scholarship about Patricia Smith, Kendrick Lamar, Jayne Cortez, funk music, protest in black poetics, and the centrality of elegy in black writing. Organizers can rest assured that the goals of the institute are being met. We made alliances as co-conspirators. We are calibrated to the righteous, liberating, and needful nature of Black poetry. We are moving and we are doing.
Onward.
P.S. Gratitude for carving space to include graduate students in the institute. I am honored to have attended, cloaked in all my naivete and youth.
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