Rebecca roanhorse. So, we are not going to take audience questions but feel free to chat amongst yourself in the chat feature and let us know where youre viewing from. Well re recording the event so folks who couldnt join us live can watch this later on and ill give you a quick rundown of the format. Were going to give each author seven to mine minutes to talk about anywhere upcoming books and then we joy will lead a chat of the group. So without further adieu ill pass things over to zerina and well take it away. Zerina maxwell the msnbc political analyst, commentator, speaker and writer the and the senior director of progressive programming for pierus xm cohost of signal boost. Take it away. Im so excited to be here this evening. I know so many of us are struggling through our individual circumstances during this quarantine, and maybe were thinking and wondering what we can do in this particular moment to make the world around us just a little bit different and a lot better. So, i cant to thank book expo and Publishers Weekly for having us here tonight. Im so excite for the discussion but also to take this opportunity, the first opportunity to talk about my upcoming back, the end of white politics. Out on july 7th and im so excited to share with you. So, what is the end of white politics . A lot of people are going to ask me that question. What is it, zerina and ill say, politics. Politics is what white politics is essential. We have been doing it the entire time. I want everybody to hear me out on this. What my premise is, the end of white politics is putting an end to the signal and solitary focus on white voters and thats a fact. According to pew research, white voters will be a minority of the american electorate by the year 2045. So why wait until then to start moving and voting and organizing like were the majority. In fact, some states like california, white voters are already a minority of voters. But even beyond these demographics and generational shifts that are already underway in america, we must fill demand that still demand atunder leadership, both reflect our diversity and our progressive values. Diversity and inclusion are about more than a pretty picture congressman presley, another member of the squad, in addition to representative omar who will be joining us later hopefully, she says that the people closest to the pain need to be closest to the power. That means the people who have the statement lived experiences as me, black woman, may have a better understanding of the needs of people who also look like me. And that is required in the future in terms of setting public policy. Lived experiences matter. And i want to ask everyone at home a question. I know were virtual so i cant hear your response back but i want you to silently think about Election Night and all of the graphics on the screen win youre watching the returns coming in. So aisle a black College Educated woman. I also have a law degree which is why its good this wasnt held at the Javits Center because thats where we lost the election in 2016, and where i took the bar exam. So not a good place. But on Election Night, when youre looking at the graphics, do you ever wonder why there isnt a graphic for a black College Educated woman . I do. Im never in any of the graphics or pie charts. Why dont i get the privilege of nuance . I dont get a slide. You in the how this works and you know what im talking about. The slides go like this. White excuse me working class men, college educate women, suburban women, these all mean white. Ever wonder why we have different analysis for different segments of white voters and latino voters are just latino votes. And black voters are just the black vote. In fact the only time latino voters get nuanced is when we are talking about the state of florida. As we sit here and we understand that voters, particularly those of color, are never a monolith, why are we not affording them the honor of some nuance. Because what we want to do Going Forward is avoid what went wrong in 2016. So now im going to read a shore excerpt from the introduction of my book. It is based on a situation that really happened at a conference in los angeles, california, right before the 2018 midterm elects. The audience was full of mostly bernie supporters but some trump supporters, just in George Washington but the audience was very rowdy. The panel was called, what now, liberals . So heres my else say about 2016. An excerpt from chapter 1. I lived through 2016 with a birds review of it all and have the battle scars i suit what worked and didnt and while arch had something to say about the failed political campaign, usually dont include the fact that black turnout dropped 7 from 2012. And that largely impacted the outcome of the election. How could it not . And it isnt that most black people were just too busy. Its that 4. 4 Million People who voted for barack obama in 2012 either stayed home or had their vote suppressed and a third of those people were black. The nearly 1 million black voters who decided not turn out in 2016 would have likely tipped the election to Hillary Clinton. But we have on sellsed incessantly about 77,000 votes which we assume all White Working Class voters. In bastions like wisconsin and michigan. And there doesnt seem to be enough media or party focus on the black voters. Or latino voters. The last time i checked, the number one million is bigger than the number 77,000. The tangible imtact on voter enthusiasm that took effect in 2016 that we have yet to deal with. Some attributed to russia, of course, some of it is really just our predisposed biases and well never know how much that had an pact. The voter precision that led to a Trump Victory resulted from many factor but one that cant be denied is that the party stannment and the leftie types all contributed to the outcomes as well. Because they were exactly the warrant exactly doing a in job of engaging voters like me because we are an afterthought instead of the central focus of the Democratic Party. Since the beginning of the country issue whiteness and white voters have been analyzed obsessed off however the country is changing and politics must to. After more heckling by the mostly white audience he was the moderator tried to calm everyone down. Tried to say stop it. But i chimed in with this. There are kids in cages and i you are progressive we can Work Together to get this dude out of the white house but the only way to do that is to engage women like me, black women, and that is when the spark for this book came. In that political room of leftists became a clarifying moment as he recognized the need to define the strategy for the fewer of democratic succession success. That sees will be built on a foundation of people and communities of color who will need more than a few lines about free college no deliver their much needed votes. We also arent going to show up for folks trying to yell and manipulate us into submission and arent willing to listen, including to our feedback about their shortcomings. No one and to win future elections across the board and reestablish the power of our democracy, we need to start looking at the reality stairing news the face, the future of politics is not only going to be about what white voters want and think. But will expand to include the ideas and the needs of people of color. Who look like me. Black women. Our party will need to evolve to meet the demands of women. One thing i think people dont understand about me is that i didnt join the Hillary Clinton campaign because im a Hillary Clinton obsessed woman. I joined after working on the president obamas campaign because i saw the threat of donald trump from really far away. Going forward, we need to listen and be honest in our assessment how things have been done in the past, where the Democratic Party in the country has again wrong in reaching voters who look like me and let us lead the way. So, that was a brief excerpt from me book and i only had nine minutes so i dont want no go on too long because we have a poet lowerat laureate coming and that up thats cool. My become is out july 7th and i hope you pick it up and at least examine the way we talk but politics is often focused on white voters and esteem wiz dont even put the white in front of how we discuss politics. And so what i would like to do Going Forward is to center all voices and particularly the voices of women of color who an incredibly important growing force in the american electorate. Thank you for listening to me this evening about my book and i know we have so many great guests coming up. Thank you so much. We cant wait to get our hand on that book. So up next, we have joy harjo. An internationally renowned performer and writer of a poet laureate in the United States. In 2020 she was named to a second term as poet laureate. The author of nine books of poetry, several plays and childrens books, and a memoir, crazy brave, her many honors include the ruth lilly prize for Lifetime Achievement front the poetry foundation, the academy of american poets Wallace Stevens award, i a pep u. S. A. Literary award, Leila Wallace readers die just fund writers award, rasmussen u. S. Artist fellowship, two nea fellowshipss and a guggenheim fellowship. A chancellor of the American Academy of american poets and they founding board member of the native art. She lives in tulsa, oklahoma and is the tulsa artist felley. Ladies and gentlemen, joy harjo. If you can just enable your microphone. Okay. Hello out there or in here. Youre all kind of in my room, too. Im happy to be here, and to talk about the Norton Anthology of native poetry called when the light of the world was subdued. Our songs came through and Norton Anthology of native nations poetry, finally time for a norton an alcohol of native poetry. So im going to talk about how it came together and the challenges in putting together such an anthology. When i first kind of came on the scene as a young poet and with a chance sometimes these huge conferences like the modern Language Association as a young native poet and it was in the beginning of the multicultural awareness in american literature, it was interesting the africanamericans only had their africanamerican critics and editors. Shame asianamerican, asianamerican american critic, chicano and latino and look at the area for native poets and native literature, and they were all nonnative critics and editors and so when we came to this anthology, i was think can but how far we had come from that point because always had poets, too, is that i started assembling a team but first i knew i needed a lot and i was a chair of excellence at that time at the university of tennessee and i look around and had wonderful students, so i said i can do this if i bring them in and then i brought in leann, a choctaw poet, writer, academic and she became my rising person and eventually jennifer for evidenter, and i assembled the team and this how it got down at the university of tennessee who learned about native poetry and helped immensely and then we brought to a team, all the ed tore, the contributing jet tore are native poets which i think is kind of a first here, and but we started out with a lot of challenges. At first the thought, most people have no idea that some people in america think they dont know were alive and think john wayne killed all off us and some think they might be natives but poets . I became poet laureate and they said, okay, one poet. Well there are many poets. We have i think it was 14 or 16 poet editors for this anthology. And all working poets, native poets, and then we so then we went to work, and we decided the other thing is that this country, the roots of poetry in the country, usually people look to europe or but the root of poetry in america come from china, come from all up and down the hemisphere and yet its indigenous poet thats indodge introduce poetic roots that really have affected all of American Culture in one way or the. Other so it is important to do this, to do this collection to highlight, and but what were working with these were the challenges in trying assemble this is that, one, we have internet so we can all meet together on skype, zoom, whatever, and we would have any students get to see incredible discussions with native poets as we started assembling this. But we had lot of challenges like, okay, we have first we were given hundred 50 pages 350 pages and how do you fit literatures of over 527 thoroughly recognized tribe and other tribes beyond theres other numbers beyond that, how do you feel that with distinct cultures and languages and literatures into 350 pages . We did go over but that was a challenge. And also we wanted to make it historic so we good from the oldest, the oldest piece is from hawaiian, and we have tried to fit in as many older translated pieces and they were contemporary translated pieces in original language in here, i too. So we have 350 pages to go from time immemorialal to the youngest poets born in 1991. So that was one that was one challenge insuring. We had to cover the interregion of the mainland u. S. , alaska, hawaii, and some of the pacific islands. So, that was really quite a task. How do you do this . How do you assemble this, and yet theres so much literature so much dynamic literature being written so many poets, younger poet, older poets. So, what was exciting was to gather we divided decided, okay, how do we get across that sense of consciousness that the americas that was my generation calls it, where indian country. All indian country, the whole hemisphere. That was another thing. We could i have always wanted to do one hemisphere because in the indigenous way of thinking the hem fear is a body of one. We founding can hes on the u. S. And so were trying get it across, okay, how is it geographically. In our literature theres a con desk and theres a place and its land. So, anyway, we started we divided the u. S. Into five geographical areas, northeast, midwest, plains, five geographical areas and so the anthology is divided up that way, and each area goes from the oldest literature to the youngest, and we only had room this anthology could have been three our four times as big. So we are right now we have i think its 167 poets, and its been quite a task but i think what i will do is to read you maybe read from something from one over the youngest poets, and i guess some of the oldest. I said one of the oldest poets we dont know his his him in was elir. From the northeast and he was raised in a mission camp in the mission school, and his first piece which is actually part of a sermon was published by cotton. Thats one of the oldest. One of the youngest is two youngest poets are jake skeet, 1991 and i think he was just awarded a whiting award, and then a jamaica a young poet performer activist from oahu, and i might read a little bit of her poem. I guess whoa i a the poems have quite a range. Theres no one native poet there are many native poets and the art of poetry is so alive in this country. I remember being a student at indian school, and a lot of times we wouldnt talk in class but we passed poetry around and it is a living art. It is native even if its printed its still made of our brush and poetry we all turn to poetry in these times, in times of transformation because is carries as our breath does it carries or wishes, hopes, dreams, and kind of the poems are like little stations that can up the level of our perception and our hearts. So, this one i heard jamaica do this at the brave new world, the competitions for spoken word and i believe she was probably a High School Student then. Just going read the english. The last of the poem, so beautiful in hawaiian, and its her genealogy, which is so important to say, this is who i am related and this who is i am related to and im related to this island here and these trees and so on. This is just the beginning of it and ill end with this. Thank you. What happened to me once forgotten, the ones who shaped my heart from their rib cages. Want to taste the tears in their names. Trace their souls into my vocal chords so i can feel related seven because i have forgotten my own froms milledle names what colors god used to sew me death. Theres culture bee night the skin i have been searching for since landed here but hard to feel sometimes because at stanford we are innovative. The senior mcintosh thinkers of tomorrow and i have forgotten how to remember but my roots cannot remember how to dance if we dont chan for them and will not sing. Everyone here listening but feeling too foreign in our own mouths and dont dare speak outloud and we canned even remember our own parents names so when we were little kids, to remember mine if i dont teach them. I want to teach my future children how to spell family with my middle name. How to hold love. How to taste culture. Please do not forget me, my father. Who cannot fit forget his own. Do not forget what is left because thats all we have and you wont find our roots online. We have no dances or chaps, we have no history, just rans no roots, just tearsthis is all i have of our Family History and now its yours, and then theres beautiful, beautiful chant in which she names herself as part of those roots, part of the roots of the island, of the americas, of american poetry and says do not forget it. Thank you. Thank you so much, joy harjo. So, next up we have carmen maria machado, the author of the moment moyer in the dream house and he short story check her body other parties. A finalist nor National Book award and the win are for the fiction prize, the lan dough literary award for lesbian fiction, the brooklyn publicly literature pry and the National Book critic circumstances john leonard prize in 2018 the New York Times listed her body and other parties as a member of the van guard, one of the 15 remarkable books by women shaping the way we read and write in the 21st century. Carmen. Thank you for having me. Im carmen maria machado. Aim the author of body in other parties, in the dream house and. A few years back i get a very exciting im im from the folks in d. C. They were fans of my writing and citied me if i had any interest in writing a horror comic and i love comics but it had never even occurred to me that was a thing i could do. But so, yeah, the chance to write one, and i dug around in old files and found notes i had made for a story men years before that never turned into anything about a town in central pa called shudder to think, pennsylvania, i decided to turn it into a pitch and i did and the low, low woods was been. They were like, cool can he want to make this work, how too you feel out joe hill . And i love joe hill so i got to work with him. And they told me that hill house and theres i just got really excited to work with joe who i had met years before and i loved joes writing. Its really special and a special prepares in presencen the Literary Community so it was exciting to work with him. The low, low woods this store of two framed, octavia andel. Ive been describing the am a square of queer dirt bag teaches in shudder to think, which is fictional but based on a real town. The story opens with the two of them wake enough a Movie Theater with mud on their shoes and no memory having watched the movie they were there to see. It kicks off a midthat takes them to every inch our their small rural town, including an abandoned resort in the mountains where they encounter secrets, alongside horrifying monster, group of skinless men, leaning trees trees and ran bide highs. Active ya is in love with her class nate, jessica, because in the rite of passage to in the love with your classmate, jessica. Turns otherwise that jessica is the daughter of a sinkhole so that puts a little bit wrench spa their relationship. And ell is trying decide if college is right for her and also trying to figure out why theres a plague of amnesia spreading in their town. Next slide, please. Oops. The inspiration for the story initially came from a dream i had, but the inspiration for the setting came from my own adolescence. I grew up in eastern pennsylvania, a few hours away from where i grew up there is a town called centralia, aabandonned now but its been on fire for decades am coal seam was hit by lightning and is still burning today. The ground leaks smoke and the ground is cracked and smoke comes into the air, its a very desolate, haunted place. If you were a kid who grew up in pennsylvania in the 1990s or 2000s, it was a rite of passage to skip school and visit centralia and take a lot of moody black and white photographs of the crackness theground and the smoke and the drift. I was cool. Did not get a chance to do this but i was interested in centralia as a location and so i used it as a model for the town of shudder to think. I also incorporated other bits of weird pennsylvania in into a genre im calling pennsylvania goth thick; i think pennsylvania is a strange and beautiful place and deserves the kind of literary attention that other states have gotten. Its a perfect setting. It was also really important to me my name character, octavia and ell, young million, women of color, and they were queer and ell was fat. We have ideas who lives in rural spaces and how their lives might have lookedded in pass and it was important to me to create their existences as a matter of fact and not hem and how around it and just feel like these are young women and their lives and the problems hair having and you seek the two of ohm the emand a little hint of the deer woman who is very scary, i think. Third slide, please. I admit i was also nervous about moving from traditional prose to a comic script. My editors at dc, including joe, were amazing pout this process. I was getting like aplus education in comics writing was i was working on the project. I remember one lesson in particular where they explained to me something i had never occurred to me as a prose writer which is if you have a moment of shock or surprise in a comic you want put it on the even numbered page so the reader turns the page and is i surprised or shocked by what is on the page. You put it an the odd number page the eye can drift and spoils the surprise. So that would have never occurred to in the in ten million years, it was a really good lesson and i feel like i was the whole time i was getting interesting notes from people how to frame a story visually and i was not i couldnt rely exclusively on my own prose because there had to be a visual element and the process of writing was the vicinity was so excite and can interesting to me im now working on a screenplay because it got very jazzed up about writing in that way and thinking but visuals as well as thinking about prose. One of the biggest joys of the project was getting to work with other artists. I can barely draw stick figure so im sure you can imagine the magic of writing a bunch of pages and then having an artist like tany, super casually handing you art that looks exactly like what you conceived of in your brain, very upsetting as well as exciting. And tamaras colors you can see on the slides were so saturated, i want to cry when i tot the bills and i to be able to share my story with other artists who were bad ass and cool and get to the experts in their own field like really excite and one of the best part of the project. A very special joy. I really excited to have all the issues of the low low woods collected to a single volume, which is what im talking about today. I think that book sellers and librarians would love having this book as an introduction to my become for certain readers and exiting fans of my fiction and nonobjection mosque with love my foray into comics. The most recent issue, number five, hit stores in digital platforms yesterday, which is very exciting, and the final issue number six is going to be out on tuesday, june 23rd. The collected edition will be so gorgeous. The illustration i cant wait to hold it in my hot little hands. Available anywhere books are sold september 29th. Thank you so much. Hope you stay happy and healthy. Thank you so much. That was i cant wait to get nat my hot little hands either. So, i do not think we have representative omar joining us but ill read her bioin the hopes she is able to jump in when she can. U. S. Representative ilhan omar represents minnesotas fifth Congressional District in the u. S. House of representatives. Which includes minneapolis and surrounding sub suspiciouses. An experienced twin cities policy analyst, organizer, public speaker and advocate, representative omar was sworn into office in january 2019. Making her the first somali american member of congress, the first woman of color to represent minnesota, and one of the first two Muslim American women elected to congress. In 2016 she was elected as the minnesota house representative for district 60b, make her the highest elected somali American Public official in the United States and the first somali american state should as a member of congress she resists attempts to divide us and protect us from destructive policies that chip away at our rights, freedoms to, bailed more inclusive and compassionate culture that will allow our economy to flourish and encourage more americans to participate participate. Her book, this what america look is like my downfrom from refugee to congresswoman comes out next month, i belief. Hope any the can hop into the conversation later on, but for now theres her book, and we can she can join us later. So, without further adieu im going witch to Rebecca Roanhorse. So you can enable your camera and mic. So this rebecca roon horse is a New York Times best selling author of trail of lightning, storm of locus awards and was the recipient of the award for best new writer. The book, black sun, is out in october. She lives in new mexico with her family. Hi, everybody. Im Rebecca Roanhorse and i have to tell youve that my computer completely crashed while joy was talking, so i was like desperately trying to get back on the zoom so hopefully everything is okay on that end. Someone let me know if its not. Im coming to you from new mexico which is the home to over a dozen native individual individual native nations. Im in santa fe, which means im just about half an our south of pueblo where my mother and her people are from. And have been there for over a thousand years. I want to tell you about myself first because im probably new to a lot of you. Then ill tell you about black sun and then while writing black sun really means to me. So, first about me. Lets see. My mom is tissue low, my dad is black. I was adopted and i was raised in forth worth, texas. I got out of there pretty quickly, as quickly as i could and i went east for college. I got a degree from yale and another from columbia. I actually reunited with my birth mother, moved to new mexico and attended hall here so just like i live in the Navajo Nation and other roles with native nations and the state of new mexico. But i will tell you this whole time through my entire childhood and certainly through the drills of practicing law i was writing. Not with an eye toward publication but for me. Writing for me has always been an act or survival. But i wasnt even think but publication, i guess, because i am a black and native woman, writing Science Fiction and fantasy, and i really didnt know could i be published. I had not discovered folks like butler and and there were no certainly in native women writing in the genre it wasnt something i had conceived of. What i was doing, i think, is what Tony Morrison has told us to do, which is writing the story that i wanted to see in the world. So black sun is a story that i wanted to see in the world. It is a big, sprawling epic fantasy for me in the lines of a honored lord of the rings ringsr game of thrones if i could be so bold. The thing that black sun is different its not inspired by a western european or pseudo european history. It is inspired by the history of the indigenous america, colombia and preconquest. So the maritime maya and the sea farring and trade routes that covered continents. The empire building m aztecs the cosmic cities of the ancestral puebloans like mesa verdict and the mound builders who built the great city of kahokia and maybe some cultures are more familiar than others because the u. S. Does not seem to value its own aint vent preeuropean indigenous history but i share you all these cultures were sophisticated and rich in culture and complex. You have architecture to rival their contemporaries in asia and africa and europe. You had great astronomer priests who mapped the solstice and equinox and noted the super nova of the cloud nebula 500 years before galileo. You had cities with advanced sewer systems and so behalf the invading spanish noted it all through beauty. Right before they destroyed them, of course. And then you had people building pyramids in 1250ad. Established a city larger than london at the time. Black sun is nat history book. It is a fantasy book, definitely. This is a place where i let my imagination run. You have spear made s, warrior maidens, and warriors, forbidden magic and political intrigue and prophecies. God touched prophecies i like to say. Black sun is just about people. And some of the best stories are, and black sun is but four people in particular that are sort of on this cosmic collision course that is going to cumulate on the solstice under a rare solar eclipse. One of them. Is a man sadded with a destiny he did not choose but his choices now will mark him either a hero or villain. Another one is a young whom what is banished from their tightknit community and trying to survive in a world that does not want her and she is not doing such a great job. Another is a young man caught up in grief both generational and individual who must decide between war and peace and his responsibility to each and the last is a priest ess set on reform who loves an inning constitution that does not love her back. Jones is an indigenous horror writer and a professor at uc boulder and he talks about the indigenous adventure story, and he says something along the lines of the western european adventure story often starts with the heroes at the center and then that hero must leave home and sort of spiral out and find their place and their meaning in life the their place in the world by going out from their from home, right . The heroes journey that were all familiar with. But joes said the indigenous adventure stories starts with the hero outside of the spiral. They have been separated from home somehow through genocide oar trauma or through the history of indigenous history in the americas what they must do is spiral inward, find theyre way back to Community Back to home and very much the four characters i talked about in black sun are on that journey. Theyre trying to find their way back to home. Unfortunately home for one does not know them, for another does not understand them, for another does not recognize them, and for the last does not know them. I think its a journey that these characters are on but many of us are on, certainly me as an adoptee, have traveled my own version of this journey through my life. I was on 0 panel recently called the colonizing of fiction and i talked about what my first novel called trail of lightning, meant to me and how that was a novel about survival. About my own survival, as i said before, writing that was this act of survival for me. But black sun is something very different. This is my book where im allowed to thrive. I say that this is the book of my heart. This is the one that is the dream, that the little black and native girl in texas, reading about her european, western european elves and kings and dragons didnt knoll didnt know she could dream and im excited to share it with you. Before i good ill indulge and read to you actually a quote that ken liu, an amazing Award Winning author of book is leak the paper menagerie, and grace of kings wrote about black sun. He said, i am urned from black sun, bleary eyed, tongue tied, heart swollen. A brilliant world that shows the full panoply of human grief and depravity. Roanhorse is the of our continent and time. Im get that tattooed on my body and naming my second child ken liu. I just want to thank anyone for listening in, thank book expo for having me and i hope you get a chance to check out black sun and share it with your readers. Thank you much, rebecca weapon cant wait to see that tattoo when you get it. Ill do it. So, we are representative omar popped in and out, she may jump into the group chat and well be happy to have her if she is able. To but for now im going to pass things back over to zerina maxwell to host a Group Discussion with the authors so if you can turn on your mics and your video so we can all chat with each. Other. So exciting to hear everyone talk about their thought process behind their work and the ideas they wanted to put some the world because as somebody who is a trained lawyer, redid former lawyer, trained lawyer, who decided to become really circuitously a write wore worked for political campaigns its amazing just to be here and to witness, your brilliance. I was texting my friend while you were talking abuse i bus i have to get al of your comics, not just the one er talking but. Knew my cohost of my radio show would immediately know the comic because thats one of her things. I was like, oh i was like, i only researched the current one. They were talking about today. I read all things. Im very excited and horror is not my thing, so i really want to i want to start with joy. Its really an honor to chat with you today, and its your book is an anthology, you read some of the poetry of the diverse array of indigenous writers and poets. One of the things you talked about in previous interviews ive seen is this idea of having poetry ancestors. So neat a term and i really want everyone to get an explanation straight from you what that is. So, poetry ancestors. Who is that . Its that you can take probably take almost any poem and realize, okay, this poem would not be here except for, you in the, except for audrey lord or except for walt tripman, every poem has ancestors. That that came to me because i play jazz blues, native music, and im a horn player, et cetera, and everything goes back Louis Armstrong and i thought you can find billy holliday, everybody going back and then people forget that in the southeast the roots i thought that works for our poetry, too. Our poetry has ancestors. Even lands you can follow a poem across well, this place, the poem or the idea came it came through this line, like a genealogy. So you can take a poem and we cant do it here but you can start doing a whole class with one poem and say, okay, what does the poetry ancestors in well, okay, thing was influenced they were living when you talk but so and so and you read them and you read them and you read them and pretty soon everybody in the room all the poetry ancestors, every poem would be related. Thank you so much. I love that. I had to ask you that first because im a little obsessed with that phrase when i first saw it. Let me just make sure i have all my screen as big as possible. I adjusted it while you were offcamera. Rebecca, one thing you talked about is how your lived experiences and your identity informed your writing. Can you tell us about a person that you grew up with and came across during your life that inspired you not just in your writing but i think more broadly. Oh, wow. I sort of have a rule, like, no gods no heroes. So im not sure that i have an individual who inspires me. Certainly my adopted mother is pretty amazing. Shes an english teacher and was the one who really get me into reading obviously. She would drop us at the library on a summer day and zale say ill be back at 6 00 and have fun and she encouraged know write from the very beginning and even the stuff i would turn in, the poems, mostly bad poems in junior high, would we very proud of and tell everybody is was great so ill say her. She has to be anen pacing. I love that. I love my mom was always very encouraging with anything i wanted to do even. I it was not so great the first time. The first draft is not always the best. Carmen, is there anything that you left out of your final draft . Obviously all of us here have produced books, which means that you wrote a thing and then you rewrote a thing or main reorganized or jiggers the poems you included in your anthology. Carmen, anything that get left out . Thats such a good question. I mean the thing about the lo low, low woods, write kole micks in general, a its very sort of rigid structure, just i talk about visual landing on the page and you can only fit so much prose into one page. Was a lot of other time enhis me editors loor ick, okay, carmen you need to put down on the prose because the name is only soing and i question need the art so you have to she was only 22 pages. Generally speaking you have this incredibly ridged structure. My rows, have lat of formal experiment nation my protest and i like structure, and part of having a struck tire is youre structure, the think i was imagining have to redo it and leave its on the cutting room floor so i couldnt tell youve but there were like characters, theres like a bunch of characters in at the first issue, classmates and i was like i could write an entire series on one of these classmates that only came through one time. It was just about realizing what kind of spails i had and didnt have and having to sort of remove certain sub plots and trim things down because the structure is so rigid. I like to tell people editing is the main part of the process of writing. You think youre done, youre not. Youre not done. Especially as a trained lawyer, when i think if arch out there is hopefully wanting to write a become one day, you should know that the writing is maybe ten percent. A lot after that. So, joy issue wanted to ask you, your become is an anthology. Right. You didnt personally write all of the poems no. That would be a lot. But one of the things i one of my best friends in at the whole world is a poet and she i just feel like ideas and language just flow out of her but when she is having a regular conversation. My question is do you ever have Writers Block as a poet and what does that look like when youre sitting and trying to come up with the words for your poem and youre face something sort of Writers Block. What do you do in that moment. I think Writers Block ive come to understand it i like talking about process and how i working on a memoir and i call this ben pile the bone pile, and things im leaving out and then theres the thing. With poetry we work just as hard. May not look like it. Some people think you get an idea and write it down and it there is but a poem sometimes you research, i mean, theres a lot that guess into it. Sometimes, like anybody in any art you can get stuck and what that means to me is that im going the wrong direction. Worked on a poem all summer one time. Had a poulter this thick and led it fold are this thick and i let it good. I realize it that was useful but its not there. So sometimes youre going the wrong way. So you have to go another way. Thats to me what a block is. You have to find a way over it, around it, or you need to stop. You just need sometimes you just work hard against something as long as you just need to stop and say, okay, im going to go on a little vacation, or i need something else. You might read ore hear something, listen to some good music or watch a play. Theres something in the eat food. You need nourishment, spiritual food. I love that idea that you might just have to stop. Thats a process, white seems like it was a quoteunquote failure, the process is actually where the value is and i like that idea. I think you think but see the finished book. But sometimes the process of writing is where the i really like that idea. Wanted to ask you that as a poet. Everybody has this idea that poetry flows out. Yeah, right. Youre like, eureka and have a poem and it flows out. So, rebecca, i want to ask you, what is one of the most sizing things you learned in writing your book . Oh, i did a lot of research nor book because it is inspired by the indigenous American History of the indigenous americas americas so i learn but the maritime maya but my favorite thing i learn is i learn a lot about core individual. A lot of Corvid Research because my book has mythology based around¢. They have emotions and social sometimes and can hold a grudge for generations. So theyre just really cool. That do you mean . Stay it again. A crow would be mad about something and they. They will tell other¢ including their children and pass it down from generation to generation, so dont piss them off because theyll remember your fails and they will hold it against you. That is really surprising. Very good answer to my question. Im like, what . Im all surprised about things i learn about other species that i didnt know before. I wanted how much more time do we have . I just want to make sure i i dont go over the time because Representative Ilhan Omar may be making an appearance and i would never want to carmen, i really want to know what were your dreams . When you first started, when you sat down at the desk or at your laptop or with the pen to begin, what were your dreams for the book . My you mean what i wanted it to be . Yes. Oh, wow. I think what i wanted theres certain comicked that have been very formative for me and graphic work that when ive read it i felt transform or like i stepped into . Other world. That i felt the same way. So i was imagining, like, you know, how does one create like a sort of conventionality in space where like, you know, even though youre noticeably there, the images are threedimensional, but the reader feels it has space and dimensionality and the characters feel real versus unreal in a lot of ways. So i just wanted to feel transported the readers to be transported the way that i felt. Id also been thinking a lot about the comic series that i loved when i was younger called stagers in paradise but was also very queer and some bodypositive characters in it that when i was, like, 20 i read it. It blew my mind completely and, again, i want readers to feel that way and to sort of enter into the story in that same way. That was my goal. [laughter] writing is like having a goal and trying to reach it, scrambling for it constantly, you know . The word power. Right. You know, it sounded like youre trying to articulate the vision with words, right . Sometimes that can be tricky. Someone once described it to me like you imagine a horse, and you draw a little stick figure horse, and youre like, uhoh, and youre constantly trying to make the horse look more like a horse in your mind, and thats e what riding writing is, moving toward a threedimensional horse. Definitely can relate to that one. I think the ill ask you as well, carmen, a person in your life that inspires you, and then ill go to joy with that question because i e really think particularly because we do something i never considered myself really a writer or creative until very recently. And im still i feel like its important to identify and then also think about who are those folks that are inspiring me to create, to change the world that im living in for the better. So, carmen first to you, and then well go to joy for that question. Thats a question i asked rebecca to start, but i loved this question because you have to be inspired to write with. So who inspires you . I feel like there are so many artists, especially the men, queer women, women of color whose work has motivated me or opened up sort of new spaces in my mind. So shirley jackson, angela carter, kelly link, karen russell. I mean, i feel like theyre people who when i first started writing fiction seriously, it was through their work that i understood, like, how there were is so few rules and how there was so much that i could do. Which was a real moment of revelation for me as an artist. So, yeah, there were folks who i remember just reading their work and being like, i didnt know you could do this. You can do this . How can you do this . They did it. Someone did it before i was born, you know . Some of them are doing it right now. And those things are really exciting to me and made me feel like, yeah, i could do anything i wanted. That really freed me up from the weird hangups about what good art looks like. And yeah, i think really, like, set me on my way. I like that. Anyone, anyone gets to make art. Joy, what about you . Who inspired you, and who is inspires you now especially . Oh, wow. Okay. Well, i started thinking of poetry ancestors because you also have poetry descendants, theres a genealogy, and i think of leslie sill coe. I started writing poetry as an art student at the university of new mexico. I started taking classes with her, but i knew her first from her poetry. She is a fiction writer who went to law school, a lot of fiction writers do because law is really storytelling. It really is. But her poetry really mixed the land scape, you know, the environmental without being, you know with, it was the landscape and the moreover logical, you know, mythology with environmental, with Human Behavior and misbehavior all in a poem and then into her stories. She was very supportive too. She gave me a typewriter when i needed one, you know . She was present. But her work still inspires me. Shes in laguna pueblo. Then the poet, the chilean poet [speaking spanish] i loved his song, its one of my favorite poems about colonization really, about how a whole village shifted from a certain way of being to one in which the sort of like the center of, it scattered, the world scattered. And i got to meet him once in amsterdam. Hes gone now, long gone. And then Alexander Posey who was very well known in his time. Died pretty young but turns out im related to him. He did an anthology. And leslie did an anthology. Theres just a whole realm of young native poets like natalie diaz, jennifer forester, i mean, theres all kinds of really incredible young native poets. And they didnt just, you know, i think the ancestral line goes way, way back into our native languages. You know, in our languages, we know that language is alive. Its a living thing. Right. For everybody. What you say comes into the world. You know . Whether you are at a Political Convention or [laughter] the words shape us. We have to watch out for all this false narrative, you know, that goes on and so on, but it starts shaping us in ways that we dont always realize. My best all this time about how poetry and politics needs to be way more intertwined and that more poets, you know, should be involved in politics and vice versa [laughter] because language, you know, poets are, have a way to shape and create language that communicates a very specific thing. And that can be very hopeful in politics because we need to be able to communicate to massive amounts of people. Carmen, its really the same question to you in terms of who inspired you, and, you know, i guess in this moment and also previously, who did you look for that inspiration . Did you mean rebecca . Did i yeah, carmen . You already asked me, yeah. No i thought i asked rebecca this question first. Am i going through the screen wrong . Yeah, yeah. Rebecca has not answered that question yet. Okay, rebecca, if you could answer that question. Okay. Well, i answered a little, you know, i started with my mom. You did, you did. [inaudible conversations] i was like, wait, i knew this. What about you . Do they know it about you . I would is say that my mom absolutely inspired me. In the dedication i talk about its just the woman who taught me how to use my voice. You know, a living example of how to use your voice to speak up for yourself, for other people. And she never let me forget, like, where i came from. I couldnt be, you know, spoiled or entitled or have an attitude. She always put me in check real quick. [laughter] but i think one of the biggest lessons is when she would stand up for herself or other people in my present when i was young, and it in my presence, and it taught me a way to be. Particularly as a black woman because, you know, it can be hard out here. Yes. I would is say my mother inspired me. And my dad. Hes a scientist, and im quarantined with everyone. [laughter] and so its actually kind of like getting to know my family again, because now im an adult, and i wasnt before. I lived with them like 20 years ago, right . So its a very interesting my dad is also a scientist oh, is he . Yeah. And i keep thinking about i dont know if your dad is the same way, but my dad was trying to get me into the sciences so hard. Constantly, like, take ap chemistry, take this, and i was very bad at all of it. [laughter] yeah, and then i go, to im going to be a writer, and he was like, oh, no [laughter] for me, i always wanted to be a lawyer oh, okay. Sure, yeah, yeah. Like, when i was in tenth grade biology and i got a d that was hard. [inaudible] so literally, i have to get the signature from the parent. I call my dad, i got a d on my biology. He was like, i am very disappointed, this is just embarrassing. [laughter] i remember crying to my chemistry teacher, my dad is a chemist, whats wrong with me . I feel very inadequate in that way, but i figured it out. [laughter] i wish i would have listened to them more. Uhhuh, i agree. So we have five minutes. We have time for one more question. [inaudible] while we were chatting. I asked that. Do any of youll have past published works that, you know, are pollution now and that are hopefully coming out soon . Ill go to joy first, and then i will go around the right way in the order. I also have a patientback another book coming out, a paperback edition of american sunrise. And then im working on a memoir right now, its called for justice, for love. And im working on that. And then a musical, an album. And then a musical around the story of the American Music that includes natives. In the origin story of blues and jazz. Really cool. And more poetry and more, you know [laughter] et cetera. Thank you. No, thats wonderful. I love that music, poetry, memoir, beautiful. Its like, you know, never stop with just one type of creativity. Rebecca, same question. Yeah, i have a novella coming out in the spring called threat of angels, and it is sort of what i like to call my business theme punk story. So its set in, a little later than Victorian Era in, like, 1905 when the state of e boy ya almost came into being which probably joy knows about quite well. In 1905 what was indian territory in oklahoma petitioned to become its own state. They had a governor, they had a constitution, they were ready to go. But the u. S. Congress vetoed that. Unfortunately, you know, for all kinds of reasons as you can imagine, and they were rolled into oklahoma and became the state of oklahoma. So theres an alternate history element to the story. It is a fantasy story, but it is a sort of what if, you know, what if we had had this indian state, what might things look like. And it is also sort of a good old fashions murder mystery that may or may not have clothwork angel withs in it. Im very excited about this, and this is going to sound super random. Its going to sound like im just saying this, but im really not. I have a bet friend whos e e a poet, another is a historian of africanAmerican History and indian history, so if you need a historian, i know one. Excellent, excellent. [laughter] specifically we were just talking about it. Super cool. That was my big follow up. Carmen, last question to you because were almost out of time. So i am working on a new book. It is a collection of, like, stories that is various time periods. One of the stories came out earlier this year, its called the lost performance of the high piece hes of the temple of horror, its set in paris in the 1930s. And the other stories in the book are in different time periods. And then im also working on a screenplay for possibly well, ill tell you, its a horror screenplay, so im very excited about that. Im excited about that. Im scared of horror [laughter] my radio show cohost on sirius is the best. She also explained to me or horror as a genre of just progressive politics. Then i got really into it and sort of putting that because just like, you know, the political lens of horror as a genre is really intense and cool, and i just didnt realize that [laughter] yes, agreed. So i think we are out of time. They told me to go to 2 45, so [inaudible] [laughter] i will stop, and i want to thank everybody for joining us tonight and back to you. Thank you so much, everyone. This conversation has been incredible, and im not alone in feeling so. Ive been keeping one eye on the comments on facebook, and the hype for each of your books is really, really incredible. Sorry to those of you that were hoping for representative omar to join us, she was not able to. She was doing all of the voting and all of everything else. Shes a very busy person, but thank you so much to all of you. We cant wait to get our hands on all of your books and thank you for making tonight super special. And now on cspan2 oohs booktv, more television for serious readers. Hello e and welcome to this special presentation, Racial Equity dur
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