This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Skye Jackson, a New Orleans-based writer and poet who teaches at Xavier University in New Orleans. She is a poet and critic whose work explores the complex and various forms of Black life, from the social life of violence to the intimate life of embodiment and familial and romantic relationships. Along with a number of poems in journals and edited collections, she is the co-author with Santos Calavera of a faster grave (2019) and author of the collection Libre (2025). In this conversation, we explore the place of poetry in articulating the meaning of Black life, the past and future possibilities of the poetic word, and how reading, study, and contemplation settle inside creative work.