THE POETRY QUESTION: TPQ20

Join Chris in a sitdown with actor, writer, producer, and all around bad-ass, Buddy Wakefield, about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry! 

BUDDY WAKEFIELD is an actor, writer, producer, and three-time world champion spoken word artist featured on the BBC, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, ABC Radio National and has been signed to both Sage Francis’ Strange Famous Records as well as Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records. In 2004 he won the first Individual World Poetry Slam Finals thanks to the support of anthropologist and producer Norman Lear, then went on to share the stage with nearly every notable performance poet in the world in over 2000 venues internationally from The Great Lawn of Central Park, Zimbabwe’s Shoko Festival and Scotland’s Oran Mor to San Quentin State Penitentiary, House of Blues New Orleans and The Basement in Sydney, Australia.

Buddy has been a busker in Amsterdam, a street vendor in Spain, a team leader in Singapore, a re-delivery boy, a candy maker, a street sweeper, a bartender, a maid, a construction worker, a bull rider, a notably slow triathlete, a facilitator at Quantum Learning Network, and is the most toured performance poet in history. He is the founder of Awful Good Writers, and the producer and host of Heavy Hitters Festival 2020, a summer-long series of online shows and workshops featuring thirty of the most beloved performance poets alive.

The inaugural author released on Write Bloody Publishing, and an original Board of Directors member with Youth Speaks Seattle, Buddy is published in dozens of books internationally with work used to win multiple national collegiate debate and forensics competitions. His first short film, Farmly, directed by Jamie DeWolf, won Best of Texas at the Literally Short Film Fest, and the USA Film Festival.

In the spring of 2001 Buddy left his position as the executive assistant at a biomedical firm in Gig Harbor, WA, sold or gave away everything he owned, moved to the small town of Honda Civic, then set out to live for a living. His aim was to tour North American poetry venues for two years. He did not stop. Wakefield, who isn’t concerned with what poetry is or is not, delivers raw, rounded, disarming performances of humor and heart.

Join Chris in a sitdown with Maya Marshall, author of All the Blood Involved in Love and an Editor at Haymarket Books, about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry! 

Maya Marshall is the author of the debut full-length poetry collection All the Blood Involved in Love (Haymarket Books, 2022) and the chapbook Secondhand (Dancing Girl Press, 2016).

Marshall teaches at Emory University where she serves as the 2021-2023 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. She has also served as artist in residence at Northwestern University and as faculty for Loyola University Chicago. She holds fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, Watering Hole, Community of Writers, and Cave Canem.

She is cofounder of underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. She is an editor for Haymarket Books.

Join Chris in a sitdown with Brian Tierney, the author of Rise and Float (Milkweed), about passions, process, pitfalls, poetry, and a whole lot of music!

Brian Tierney is the author of Rise and Float, winner of the 20-2021 Jake Adam York Prize (Milkweed, forthcoming Feb. 2022). His poetry and prose have appeared in such journals as Paris Review, Kenyon Review, AGNI, NER, The Adroit Journal, and others. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a graduate of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars, he was named among Narrative Magazine’s 2013 “30 Below 30” emerging writers, and is winner of the 2018 George Bogin Memorial Award from The Poetry Society of America. Raised in Philadelphia, he lives in Oakland, Ca., where he teaches poetry at The Writing Salon.

Join Chris in a sitdown with I.S. Jones, author of Spells of My Name, and Editor at Frontier Poetry, about passions, process, pitfalls, and Poetry!

I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet, essayist, and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. She is the co-editor of The Young African Poets Anthology: The Fire That Is Dreamed Of (Agbowó, 2020) and served as the inaugural nonfiction guest editor for Lolwe. She is an Editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, freelanced for Complex, Revolt TV, NBC News THINK, and elsewhere. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Offing and elsewhere. Her poem “Vanity” was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She received her MFA in Poetry at UW–Madison where she was the inaugural 2019­­–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship and the 2021-2022 Hoffman Hall Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient. From 2019 to 2022, she served as the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory, a community-driven contemporary arts center in Madison, Wisconsin. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) is out with Newfound. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Frontier Poetry.

Join Chris in a sitdown with Esteban Rodriguez, author of Ordinary Bodies (word west press 2022), about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry!

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Ordinary Bodies (word west press 2022), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press 2021). He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, Senior Book Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and Associate Poetry Editor for AGNI. He currently lives in south Texas.

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Join Chris of The Poetry Question in a sit-down with Poet-Historian, Ronnie K. Stephens to talk about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry! 

Ronnie K. Stephens is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Universe in the Key of Matryoshka and They Rewrote Themselves Legendary, as well as The Kaleidoscope Sisters, a young adult novel. He is focused on developing a broader body of academic essays related to American poetry and unsettling the K-16 classroom through diverse texts.

Join Chris in conversation with Khalisa Rae, author of Ghost in a Black Girl's Throat (Red Hen Press), about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry!

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Khalisa Rae is an award-winning multi-hyphenate poet, educator, and journalist based in Durham, NC. She is best known for her community activism and nonprofit management as the co-founder of Poet.she (Greensboro), the Invisibility Project, and Athenian Press- QPOC writer’s collective, resource center, and bookstore in Wilmington, NC.

As a former English professor and public school teaching artist, Khalisa’s passion lies in uplifting women and youth through community engagement.  She has served as an outreach and program director for various nonprofits, as

well as a teaching artist, and is always looking for a way to give back and serve as a mentor.

Her first chapbook, Real Girls Have Real Problems, was published in 2012 by Jacar Press and later adapted into a sold-out play called, “The Seven Deadly Sins of Being a Woman” which was accompanied by a podcast. Her early work with stage performance and slam poetry landed her on stage at the National Poetry Slam, Women of the World Poetry Slam, Individual World Poetry Slam, and Southern Fried Regional Poetry Slam, among others.

During her time as Outreach Director of the YWCA, Khalisa completed her MFA at Queens University of Charlotte where she studied under renowned authors, Claudia Rankine and Ada Limon. There she wrote Outside the Canon– a thesis dissertation on the history of spoken word and its isolation from the literary canon as a result of systematic racism.

Currently, Khalisa is a 4-time Best of the Net nominee, multi-Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of the 2021 debut collection, Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat, from Red Hen Press. Khalisa’s performance poetry has led her to speak in front of thousands over the course of her career. She is a seasoned conference panelist and speaker, and the founder and creator of #PublishingPaidMe BIPOC Writers/Editors Panel at the AWP conference, as well as annual speaker at the SEWSA Women’s Conference. Notably, she is the former Gen Z Culture Editor of Blavity News and former Managing Equity and Inclusion Editor of Carve Magazine.

As a champion for Black queer narratives, Khalisa’s articles appear in Fodor’s, Autostraddle, Vogue, Catapult, LitHub, Bitch Media,  Black Femme Collective, Body.com, NBC-BLK, and others. Her work also appears in Electric Lit, Southern Humanities Review, Pinch, Tishman Review, Frontier Poetry, Rust & Moth, PANK, HOBART, among countless others.

Poetry has led Khalisa to be a Watering Hole Fellow, Frost Place Fellow, Winter Tangerine Fellow, among other residencies and fellowships. Currently, Khalisa serves as Senior Writer at Jezebel, Assistant Editor of Glass Poetry, and co-founder of Think in Ink and the WOC Speak reading series. You can also find her teaching Spring 2022 at Catapult Classes.

Her YA novel in verse, Unlearning Eden, is forthcoming in 2023.

Join Chris Margolin of The Poetry Question in conversation with Mahogany L. Brown, author of Woke Baby, Chlorine Sky, and Vinyl Moon (Penguin Random House), about passions, process, pitfalls, and Poetry!

Mahogany L. Browne is the executive director of JustMedia, a media-literacy initiative designed to support the ground-work of criminal justice leaders and community members. This position is informed by her career as a writer, organizer, and educator. Mahogany has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, AIR Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research, and Rauschenberg, and she founded the diverse literary campaign the Woke Baby Book Fair. She is also the author of Chlorine Sky, Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice, Woke Baby, Black Girl Magic, the poetry collection I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love, and Vinyl Moon. Mahogany is based in Brooklyn, New York, and is the first-ever poet in residence at Lincoln Center. You can find Mahogany online at mobrowne.com and @mobrowne.

Join Chris Margolin of The Poetry Questions in a sit-down with Jennifer Huang, author of Return Flight (Milkweed Editions), to talk about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry!

Author bio: Jennifer Huang is the author of Return Flight, which was awarded the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions. Their poems have appeared in POETRY, The Rumpus, and Narrative Magazine, among other places; and they have received recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Brooklyn Poets, North American Taiwan Studies Association, and more. In 2020, Jennifer earned their M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program. Born in Maryland to Taiwanese immigrants, they have since called many places home.

The Poetry Question

Sit down with Chris and Courtney Margolin, Co-EiCs of The Poetry Question, as they talk with Ada Limón, author of The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions), about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry!

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is out now from Milkweed Editions.