MJB: Welcome, Katherine and thank you for speaking with me for HER KIND about your book, Radial Symmetry, Winner of the 2010 Yale Younger Poets Prize, and your writing process, with particular attention to the presence and sensorial experience of the natural world within your work. Your book begins with the poem, “Statuary,” which seems to assume the function of a lens, or perhaps even something like a coda, but at the beginning of the book rather than the end. It seems to introduce perspective, experience as well as themes that recur throughout the text. The poem begins with the [Read more]

HER KIND: Poet Camille Dungy prompted this May conversation for HK. She writes: “Once I heard Judith Ortiz Cofer say she had to ‘steal time from herself’ in order to write.  When I heard her, I thought I knew what she meant, but now, at this early hour of the morning, having chosen not to sleep, not to make my lunch for the day, not to exercise, and not to use the last hour snuggling with my husband or my little girl, but, instead to write, I think am beginning to understand what she meant.  Now I am awake, early [Read more]

HK: Welcome to the Conversation. Alice Walker once noted, “People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.”  Have you ever tried to cover up acts of foolishness?     NELLY ROSARIO: I don’t discard the importance of the fool (and foolishness). Kings needed the no-holds-barred honesty of jesters to cut through all the court intrigues; we need Jon Stewart’s Daily Show to cut through all the media spin. It’s no coincidence that The Fool/Jester opens the tarot deck. His number is zero, the number that renders everything nada. [Read more]

HER KIND: Alice Walker once noted, “People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.”  Have you ever tried to cover up acts of foolishness?       Lillian Ann Slugocki: Whenever I think of the fool, I think of the tarot card. I think of a person so entranced by the world around her— she might not be watching where she’s going, she could fall off a cliff, if she’s not careful. But it’s also the card of infinite possibilities.  As a writer, I’ve learned to embrace the fool. Every time I [Read more]

My fear became foolishness. My desire of not seeming like a nag became my foolishness. My aggressiveness has become foolishness. —Ebony English     HER KIND: When has good sense failed you? And outside of Shakespeare, are there any wise fools?       Andrea S. Givens: A former boss used to frequently say, “Common sense ain’t that common.” I was in my early 20s when I worked for him, and although I was married, that was the only thing settled about me. Our office was just a couple of blocks from the federal building and, in their basement bakery, [Read more]

“Over the years I’ve taken the things I’ve learned from these women and thrown their lessons and stories into a cauldron.” —Qiana Towns “Like God is in the kitchen frying potatoes in a purple Mu Mu!!!” —Anastacia Tolbert “I realize now that in my family my Mama Pearl was the original and true ‘Chi’ presence whose strength and warmness still live on through my mom and I.”—JP Howard HER KIND: In the essay “Chi/Ori, or, the Mother Within,” Chiwenye Ogunyemi writes: “From a literary perspective, Chi as inspiriting muse gives the writer the courage and determination to institute, identify with, [Read more]

HER KIND: Ladies, Welcome to the Conversation. In Eleanor Lerman’s poem “Starfish,” the speaker ponders over an encounter with a fisherman, and leads her to examine her past. Are there any particular poems or poets that have challenged your perceptions or beliefs? Perhaps a chance encounter?     RITA BANERJEE: “Tell the story of your life that is the most emotionally cathartic; the story you ‘remember’ is covering the ‘real story,’ anyway.” —Patrick Duff, From the Brink of Oblivion[1] I met Patrick Duff during my first few days in Seattle in a meet-and-greet party for new MFA students at the University of [Read more]