Critical Literary Consumption

Chen Chen talks about genre, creative writing pedagogy, race, and politics as he reflects on his two full-length poetry collections, When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions) and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency (BOA Editions). On the topic of contextual and cultural references, we discussed our displeasure of the general tendency to reference Wong Kar-wai purely for aesthetic reasons without critiquing the politics of nostalgia.

Aditi Machado previews her upcoming poetry collection, Material Witness (Nightboat Books), and reflects on the concept and act of "witnessing". Witnessing then makes its poetic way into her questions of human/non-human relationality, plurality of subjects, language and etymology, and how we experience the world.

Dr. Tamara K. Nopper, a sociologist, writer, editor, and data artist, discusses her scholarly work, public essays, and editing of Mariame Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. In this conversation, we reflect on social media and (alternative) data in a scored society, the language of abolition and racial justice, and the possibility of imagining healthy public policy that attends to community needs and not criminalization.

Asako Serizawa, author of The Inheritors, and I talk about her approach in writing and ordering her story collection which spans multiple centuries. In the process, we situate themes of colonization and recolonization in the context of nationalism, American empire, postcolonialism, and science and technology as critical narrative building.

Dr. Kyla Wazana Tompkins (Pomona College) and I discuss her monograph, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century, and explore the ongoing binaries of exploring food as a topic of academic investigation: subject/object, personal/disciplinary; humanities/sciences, and materialism/humanism. She expresses the possibilities of new materialism in her second book, which continues to look at “the matter we often call food”.

I talk methods, community, and the blurring of authorial and personal selves with Kiese Laymon, author (Heavy, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America) and Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi. We address Laymon's concepts of abundance and revision, and citations as capital in academic and narrative writing.