Publication: 2024
Publisher: The Ohio State University PressA critical examination of how literary institutions elevate, constrain, and shape the recognition of Black women poets.
This post is part of the Books in Brief series, which features concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies.
1. What inspired you to pursue the lines of research and writing that resulted in this book?
So many moments and conversations! I can identify in retrospect that seeing my professor Elizabeth Alexander (yes, I was that lucky as an undergraduate) on the stage as Obama’s inaugural poet in January 2009, while I was in her course in African American poetry, began to spark something nascent. More concretely, it was noticing early in graduate school how common the “only one at a time” phenomenon or paradigm seemed, with women like Rita Dove, then Natasha Trethewey, being consecrated with the same accolades in parallel and in similar orders; I had long loved the poetry itself, but that sparked me to link it up to the ecosystem it inhabits and circumstances of its production.
2. What surprised you most during your research or writing process?
This will now surprise no one, because Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young published that great, methodologically thorough piece “On Poets and Prizes” in ASAP/Review in November 2020 (and have also since with Claire Grossman published “The Index of Major Literary Prizes in the US” data). But when I was first revising the dissertation massively to become a book, none of that was available yet, and so I was so surprised by how insular, cyclical, and closed the poetry prize ecosystem viscerally felt when looking anecdotally through the lens of contemporary Black women’s poetry. That led me to research the whole system of judging, how prizes tend to beget more prizes, etc. and how this impacts Black women (and their data later gave more weight to my own observations about the small sub-field).
3. What was the hardest decision you had to make while writing this book?
Which collections and poets to focus on! I made the unorthodox decision to write extensively about 15 collections/poets, but even culling to that was extremely difficult: I wanted to pseudo represent the breadth of contemporary Black women’s poetry in styles and subject matter but also zoom in enough to give useful case studies for different subtopics. Some advised me that I would have to cut that number, some told me to do less close reading but increase that number, but I kept coming back to (and am glad I stuck with) these 15—an imperfect selection, but hopefully useful discussions.
4. What's one lesson you learned while producing this book that you'll carry into future projects?
To trust my gut/instincts and therefore not let some types of negative feedback that don’t truly feel useful get into my head—there will always be people telling us to write different books than the ones we are writing, other projects that would also be great but just aren’t our work!—but also to listen to suggestions, especially from the editor (if you’re blessed with a good one, like I was).
5. Optional: If any come to mind, are there books in African American literary studies that you see your work in conversation with?
This one is difficult because I hesitate to place my own work arrogantly in the lofty company or even the same sentence as certain books that are certainly important to me, that inspired mine, and that are about overlapping subjects! But I suppose I’d say Evie Shockley’s Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, Meta DuEwa Jones’s The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word, and much of my mentor Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s work. Oh, and now in terms of books released after (or that I hadn’t yet read while working on it!), Ryan Sharp’s Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive and Annette Debo’s The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry come to mind.
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