Afleveringen
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On this special bonus episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with writer Tiana Clark about the person who first told her she was a poet: her late mentor and high school teacher, Mr. Bill Brown.
Tiana was a rebellious teenager. “They’re talking about you in the teacher’s lounge,” Mr. Brown warned her once. But instead of punishing Tiana for acting out, Mr. Brown gifted her the poetry of Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee, and Sharon Olds, writers whose work broke all the rules Tiana had learned in school. He continued to support Tiana for the next twenty years, cheering her on through her MFA applications, her chapbook publication, and the publication of her first book.
In the first half of the episode, we discuss Mr. Brown’s legacy in Tiana’s poetry, pedagogy, and attention to the natural world (since he could name every tree on their walks around the neighborhood). Later on, Tiana reads “Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy” from her new collection Scorched Earth, a poem that illuminates the darker history behind the pedestrian greenway where Tiana walked every day in the pandemic, and where she saw Mr. Brown for the last time. We talk about the form of the sestina and what it means to “break” it or “fail” at it. We also cover Tiana’s revised future as a historian, the politics of traveling (and writing about travel) as a Black woman, and the elegy form as an attempt to resurrect those we’ve lost.
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth; I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; and Equilibrium, which won the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and Tennessee State University, where she studied Africana and women’s studies. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Find out more at TianaClark.com.
This episode marks the end of Season 1, but stay tuned in summer for Season 2! Subscribe and connect with us on our website for updates: awakenerspodcast.com.
More Tiana: https://www.tianaclark.com/
Order Scorched Earth, out March 4, 2025: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Scorched-Earth/Tiana-Clark/9781668052075
Definition of pastoral: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/pastoral
Definition of sestina: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/sestina
Definition of elegy: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/elegy
Definition of ekphrasis: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/ekphrasis
Mentioned in the episode:
Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee, Ross Gay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Phillis Wheatley, Rick Barot, Maggie Nelson -
On this episode of Awakeners, Lena chats with writers T Bambrick and Jane Miller, who were connected by some fellow poets in Tucson when T found themselves at a crossroads in their writing. Jane had just retired from teaching (for the first time), but they began to meet regularly over brunch to talk about—well, everything.
We discuss the advice from Jane that helped T write their first book, a searing poetry collection about working a cleanup crew around a dam in Washington. We talk about moments of crisis in artmaking, how to write about harmful experiences without making yourself sad, and when and why we might want to write “small” or take up more space on the page. In the second half of the episode, T reads aloud a poem from their book Intimacies, Received inspired by a line from one of Jane’s poems, and Jane shares a poem about artmaking from Paper Banners.
Bonus: we follow T down a research rabbit hole about the violent political history of skunks.
T says: “Jane told me, Say somebody hit you with a wooden spoon. You might write a book about spoons or wood. You can work your way around the site of the most intense pain, finding something to dive into and obsess over.”
Jane Miller has written twelve poetry books, most recently Paper Banners and Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions, and two collections of essays, Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel and From the Valley of Bronze Camels: A Primer, Some Lectures, & A Boondoggle on Poetry. She is the recipient of a Wallace Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Western States Book Award, and the Audre Lorde Prize in Poetry. Jane has taught in several MFA programs, including The University of Arizona, The Michener Center for Writers, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
T Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press 2022), and Vantage (American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award 2019). Their work can be found in the New Yorker, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and is a Dornsife Fellow in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Southern California.
Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.
More T: https://www.taneumbambrick.com/
More Jane: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/authors/jane-miller/
Mentioned in the episode:
T Bambrick’s poem “Traveling”: https://missourireview.com/taneum-bambrick-traveling/
C.D. Wright
Viet Thanh Nguyen -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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On this episode of Awakeners, Lena gets temporarily inducted into a writing group called the Firefeet by writers Emily Alford, Charlie Beckerman, CJ Hauser and Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, who have been keeping their “feet to the fire”—in other words, keeping weekly goal-setting and accountability email threads—for the past ten years.
The four connected through the graduate programs in creative writing at Florida State University, and they’ve supported one another through novel drafting, book publication, family struggles, job changes, and more over the course of a decade.
We discuss how the Firefeet came together, what makes them good readers of one another’s work, the “signature moves” that characterize each of their writing, and what they’ve learned about writing group best practices.
In the second half of the episode, we define four key terms in Firefeet lingo, and we go around the circle and perform one of the Firefeet's weekly check-ins. We also celebrate Olivia, whose week is extra special: the publication of this podcast episode coincides with the pub date for Mutual Interest, her new queer historical novel about a love triangle in Gilded-Age New York.
Emily Alford is a writer living in New Orleans. A former staff writer at Jezebel, her work has also appeared in Publishers Weekly, Iron Horse, Gawker, and elsewhere. She teaches at Tulane and is hard at work on a noir novel. You can find pictures of her 15-year-old cocker spaniel on Instagram (@emilyalicealford) and rants at the TV on Bluesky (@alfordalice).
Charlie Beckerman is a writer who claims both San Francisco and New York as his hometown. His fiction has appeared in Glassworks and The Quail Bell Review, and his memoir podcast, Serial Dater, is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. He has written other nonfiction for Greatist, Thrillist, and worked as a political writer for Bustle during the 2016 Presidential Election. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to the United Kingdom, and he is working on his PhD in Fiction at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently seeking representation for his queer historical fiction novel set in London during the Second World War. He is @chozzles everywhere on social media, and you can find more information at www.charliebeckerman.com.
CJ Hauser is a genderqueer and genrequeer writer who teaches at Colgate University. They are the author of The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays and Family of Origin: A Novel. You can find them trying to keep their chin up and disseminating dog pictures on substack @dopaminedog.
Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (@owolfgangsmith) is the author of Mutual Interest (out Feb 4, 2025 from Bloomsbury) and Glassworks, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with her partner.
More at https://www.awakenerspodcast.com/. -
On this episode of Awakeners, Lena chats with poets Adrian Matejka and Austin Araujo. Austin was already a huge fan of Adrian’s work—especially his collection The Big Smoke, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—when he applied to study with him at Indiana University’s MFA program. Austin assisted Adrian with an undergrad class on the poetics of rap, and Adrian served on Austin’s thesis committee, where he helped shape an early “prototype” of what would become Austin’s debut collection: At the Park on the Edge of the Country, out next month from the Ohio State University Press.
We discuss how to preserve your past self when revising old poems, why it’s important to embed your work in a specific place, what Adrian learned from Yusef Komunyakaa, what Austin learned from Louise Glück, and how it felt for both of them when Austin placed a poem with Poetry Magazine, where Adrian now serves as editor.
In the second half of the episode, we put Austin’s and Adrian’s poems from their latest books into conversation with one another. We also cover “internal antagonists,” rap music, Prince, boxing champion Jack Johnson, why polysyllabic words make the best rhymes, and how we might claw through awe into truth when writing about our pop culture heroes.
Austin Araujo is a writer from northwest Arkansas. He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and his poems have recently appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Gulf Coast. His debut collection, At the Park on the Edge of the Country, won the 2023 The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Prize and is forthcoming from Mad Creek Books in 2025.
Adrian Matejka is the author of seven books, most recently a graphic novel Last On His Feet (Liveright, 2023), which was a finalist for the Eisner Award and was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the 10 best books of 2023. His last collection of poems Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), was a finalist for 2022 UNT Rilke Prize and the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. He served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19 and is Editor-in-Chief of Poetry magazine.
Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.
More Austin: austinaraujo.com
More Adrian: https://www.adrianmatejka.com/about
Preorder Austin’s debut collection: https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814259368.html
Austin’s poem in Poetry Magazine, “In Body Sweet”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/158807/in-body-sweet
Mentioned in the episode: Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning, Louise Glück, Yusef Komunyakaa, Terrance Hayes, A. Van Jordan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adam Bradley’s Book of Rhymes, Shea Serrano’s Rap Yearbook, Larry Levis, Ben Okri, Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain -
On this episode of Awakeners, Lena chats with the writers Kyoko Mori and Abi Newhouse, who worked together at George Mason University’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction.We discuss the evolution of Abi’s essay collection about growing up Mormon, including her experience leaving the Mormon Church during and after the MFA. We also cover ambivalence in personal narrative, the difference between context and subject, and the process of moving beyond the mentor-mentee relationship. Bonus: Kyoko recalls one hilarious piece of advice from the one and only Raymond Carver.Mori says: “I think I do try to get my students to listen to what their writing is already telling them about what they really want. But I try to do it in service to their writing, not to their life.”Kyoko Mori’s new nonfiction book, CAT & BIRD, was published in March 2024 by Belt Publishing. She is the author of 3 other nonfiction books (The Dream of Water; Polite Lies; Yarn) and 4 novels (Shizuko’s Daughter; One Bird; Stone Field, True Arrow; Barn Cat). Her essays and stories have appeared in The Best American Essays, Harvard Review, The American Scholar, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, and others. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at George Mason University and the Low-Residency MFA Program at Lesley University. Kyoko lives in Washington, DC with her cats, Miles and Jackson.Abi Newhouse is a writer, podcast producer, and the programs coordinator for Washington DC literary nonprofit, The Inner Loop. A graduate of George Mason University's MFA program in creative nonfiction, her work can be found in The Rumpus, The American Scholar, and The Hunger Journal, among others. She has taught rhetoric and literature at George Mason University and American University.Note: This episode was recorded live, so audio quality may vary during the conversation.More Abi Newhouse: abinewhouse.com and abinewhouse.substack.comMore Kyoko Mori: https://kyokomori.com/Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.
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On this episode of Awakeners, Lena chats with poets Rick Barot and Brian Teare, who met at Stanford University as young writers and have collaborated for over twenty years.
We discuss Brian’s first fingerprint on Rick’s body of work, the triumphs and failures of mentorship they experienced in institutions of higher ed, their approaches to ekphrasis (i.e. creative work that responds to a work of art, or, to quote poet Tania Clark, that “makes the static sing”), and how they helped one another “re-see” another queer artist’s ethics and aesthetics.
Teare says: “Material culture, print culture, teaching, politics, the actual practice of poetry, the role of visual art in work and in our lives… there are so many overlaps that we never run out of things to talk about.”
Rick Barot's most recent book of poems is Moving the Bones, published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. His previous collection, The Galleons, was longlisted for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, The Adroit Journal, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.
A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize. His most recent publications are a pair of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. An Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia, Brian lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
LINKS:
Introduction to the folio Teare commissioned in response to the PMA Jasper Johns retrospective: https://www.nereview.com/vol-43-no-3-2022/mirroring-practice-poets-respond-to-jasper-johns/
Rick Barot’s poem “Looking at the Romans”: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/looking-at-the-romans/
Jasper Johns’s cross hatch works: https://harvardartmuseums.org/exhibitions/4350/jasper-johns-in-press-the-crosshatch-works-and-the-logic-of-print
Jasper Johns’s White Flag (1955): https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/487065
Brian Teare’s “White Flag (1955)” from Poem Bitten By a Man: https://poetrysociety.org/poems/white-flag-1955
Adrienne Rich’s poem “Rauschenberg’s Bed”: https://margaret-cooter.blogspot.com/2016/03/poetry-thursday-rauschenbergs-bed-by.html
Martin Mitchell’s review of Rick Barot’s During the Pandemic in Phoebe Journal: https://phoebejournal.com/review-during-the-pandemic/
More Rick Barot: https://www.rickbarot.com/
More Brian Teare: www.brianteare.net and www.albionbooks.net
Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com. -
On this episode of Awakeners, Lena chats with writers Leslie Jamison and Emmeline Clein. Clein studied with Jamison at Columbia University’s MFA program, and the pair published their most recent books—Jamison’s memoir, Splinters, and Clein’s debut essay collection, Dead Weight—the very same week back in February 2024.
We discuss what they’re working on right now, what they talked about on their most recent lunch date, how Jamison’s “Archive Fever” class shaped Clein’s research, how to weave softness from words that cut, how both of their books engage with the (often maligned) desire to “revoke” or undo your decisions as a woman, and what they’ve learned from each other when it comes to writing about eating disorders, self-harm, and pain.
In the second half of the episode, Clein reads from Jamison’s feedback letter in response to an early draft of Clein’s essay “On Our Knees” from Dead Weight, and Jamison reads from “On Shame,” a lecture that has since been integrated into her in-progress book of essays about writing.
Leslie Jamison is the New York Times bestselling author of Splinters, The Recovering, The Empathy Exams, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and teaches at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Emmeline Clein is the author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm (Knopf, 2024) and Toxic (Choo Choo Press, 2024). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, The Nation, the Yale Review, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.
Links:
Awakeners featured on The Lit Hub Podcast (0:31): https://dcs-spotify.megaphone.fm/LIT3180235730.mp3?key=633b1bbb7860a1e12ffb4fa0ddd234fb&request_event_id=8055516a-55c5-4ac3-a490-1e3b1e46f10e&timetoken=1731795270_B448F57BE00F644C54A56320FDD845D3
Subscribe and connect with us on our website at awakenerspodcast.com. Follow us on Instagram for exclusive content at @awakenerspodcast. -
This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts. Host Lena Crown interviews pairs of writers, artists, critics, and scholars who matter to one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence (think feedback letters, margin comments, early essay drafts, and more). To listen is to get a window into literary traditions being formed in real time—and to simply hang out for an hour with brilliant artists and longtime friends.
Awakeners Season 1 airs every two weeks starting November 19, 2024, wherever you get your podcasts.
