In this episode of eMerge Unchained, guest host Aubrey Green sits down with poet, writer, and eco-poetic thinker Simóne J. Banks, whose work listens deeply to land, to lineage, and to the living world.

Banks discusses her lifelong relationship with poetry. Inspired by Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni and expanded through her current explorations into Black ecologies, water, land loss, and ancestral landscapes, Banks offers an intimate glimpse into her creative process, from treating the blank page as a collaborator to honoring the emotional architecture of grief, change, and the color blue.

Banks also reflects on the tension between emotional depth and technical precision, the influence of environmental justice on her work, and the quiet haunting of truth that threads through both her poetry and fiction. Whether she’s writing about hurricanes, disappearing coastlines, or what it means to “be care-full” in a broken world, Simone writes as if every word, like every seed, is an offering.

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