A conversation with Texas Poet Laureate Amanda Johnston about the anthology, the power of poetry to build community, and freedom

Amanda Johnston is a writer, visual artist, the 61st Texan Poet Laureate, and founder of Torch Literary Arts.

A conversation with jason b. crawford about their collection YEET!, finding a safe home for Black people, and how we write ourselves alive

jason b. crawford (He/They), born in Washington, DC and raised in Lansing, Michigan, is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their second collection, YEET! is the winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and was published Fall 2025. At the time of this recording, it was also a finalist for the 2026 Lammy Awards from Lambda Literary. They have been published in POETRY Magazine, Academy of American Poets, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal,  and RHINO Poetry, among others. They are a 2023 Emerging Writers Fellow for Lambda Literary and hold their MFA in Poetry from The New School.

A conversation with Nick Martino about Nonce Forms, The Possibilities of Visual Poetics, and Writing Towards Surprise

Nick Martino is a poet and teacher from Milwaukee. His debut poetry collection, Scrap Book (from Alice James Books) won the 2024 Alice James Editors’ Choice Award and will be published in June of 2026. His poems have been published in Best New Poets, Narrative, Ninth Letter, The Boston Review, and The Southern Review, among others. A finalist for the 2024 Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, he holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine where he received the 2022 Excellence in Poetry Prize. He lives in LA.

A conversation with Jonny Teklit about Joy as Poetic Practice, Poetic Influences, and How Joy Can Push Us Towards Action

Jonny Teklit is an award-winning poet who has had work appear in The Academy of American Poets, The New Yorker, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. His poems have been anthologized in Poemhood: Our Black Revival and The Gift of Animals: Poems on Love, Loss, and Connection. He is currently working on his debut collection.

Talking with Alison C. Rollins about Black Bell, the poetics of referentiality, and performance as mode of collective meaning-making

Alison C. Rollins is the author of the poetry collections Black Bell and Library of Small Catastrophes. Rollins holds an MFA from Brown University and is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was awarded a 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and named a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in 2019. Her work, across genres, has appeared in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.

A conversation with Tariq Thompson about Rhythm, Hip Hop as a Guiding Force, and the Muscularity of Language

Tariq Thompson is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. He’s the author of the chapbook LONE LILY (from Sunset Press, 2021). His poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, Split Lip Magazine and elsewhere. Thompson was a finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. He holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. You can find more of his work at tariqthompson.com.

Talking with Summer Farah about Repetition, leaning into frantic energy, and the value of revisitation

Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer, editor, and zine-maker from California. She is the author of the chapbook, i could die today and live again, poems inspired by the legend of Zelda and published by Game Over Books in 2004. Her debut collection, The Hungering Years is forthcoming from Host Publications in 2026. She's calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day.

Talking with I.S Jones about Bloodmercy, the complicated presence of God, and cataloging the milestones of girlhood

I.S. Jones is the author of Bloodmercy, chosen by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and the chapbook Spells of my Name, selected by Newfound in 2021 for their Emerging Writer series (and might I add, an O, Word? 2025 5-star read). Currently, she is a senior editor for Poetry Northwest, where she runs her column, “The Legacy Suite.” Her works have appeared in Granta, LA Review of Books, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, the Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Talking with Victoria Mbabazi about persona, anger as a motivating force, and the merits of hate.

Victoria’s work can be found in several literary journals. They have two chapbook collections, chapbook, through Anstruther Press, published in 2021, and Flip from Knife Fork Books in 2022. Both are sold out. However, their first full length poetry collection, The Siren in the Twelfth House, from Palimpsest Press, 2024 is available where books are sold. Their second poetry collection, The Stone Who Strapped Me, will be available with Arsenal Pulp Press in Spring 2027. Not so long ago, they moved to the mysterious land of Toronto, Canada.

Talking with Kay E. Bancroft about the hybridity, getting funky on the page, and messing with documents as an entryway to poetry