Francesca Ekwuyasi: Interview
by Nicole Dennis-Benn Francesca Ekwuyasi’s debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread, is an evocative, lyrical tale of three Nigerian women—a mother and her two daughters whose relationship is ripped apart by a terrible event that would take years to overcome. We follow Kambrinichi—the troubled matriarch who believes she is an obanje— a spirit child in…
Rachel Eliza Griffiths: Interview
BY OPAL MOORE I have two copies of Miracle Arrhythmia (2010 Willow Books). I bought one; the other is signed, a gift to me by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Somehow I don’t remember exactly how we met. Was it Kyla Marshell, poet and (at the time) Spelman College student and editor of Aunt Chloe: A Journal…
Bridgett Davis: By the Numbers
This interview was conducted by Eisa Nefetari Ulen for Mosaic, and will be included in an upcoming lesson plan on Louise Meriwether’s Daddy was a Number Runner and Bridgett Davis’ The World According to Fannie Davis Few residents of 20th century Black communities grew up without hearing about The Numbers. While 21st century America gets…
Mitchell S. Jackson: Interview
The average dude is myopic. He sees the hustler on the block or in cruising the boulevard or in the club or in the park, all the time sporting new shiny things, and he becomes covetous. Or else he grows up with hustlers and has that way of life normalized. I guess I had it…
Cheryl Boyce Taylor: Interview
A Mother’s Duty: An Interview with Caribbean Poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor by Mercy Tullis-Bukhari Towards the end of a New York summer, I met with poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor for some conversation about womanhood, motherhood, and poetry. I had known Cheryl for several years. When I entered the poetry world professionally, her name was already floating in…
Kem Joy Ukwu: Interview
I didn’t envision my stories together as a collection until after I wrote a number of them. I realized that most of my individual stories would fit together as a collection by noticing that my stories had strong emotional components that united them. After this realization, I started submitting my manuscript into contests. I also…
Shauna Morgan: Interview
Audre Lorde said, “speak the truth as I see it” whether it is pretty or not, painful or not. I’ve been told that I can write dagger poems—words that can be hurtful. So sometimes I am a bit apprehensive about the truth being revealed and how it’s coming through. But at every moment I write…
Rosamond S. King: Interview
by Anton Nimblett I sat down with Rosamond S. King in her Brooklyn home. Outside, pale-green pollen from hundred-year-old trees dusted the pavement as evening light played games with bright leaves. Inside, after warm flatbread and spicy curry, we sipped herbal tea and talked about Rock | Salt | Stone, her debut poetry collection from…
Nicole Sealey: Interview
by Kyla Marshell Throughout Nicole Sealey’s debut poetry collection, Ordinary Beast, there’s an idea that repeats and reverberates: death. The inevitability of our collective demise—and all the beauty we make “with our brief animation” (“Object Permanence”)—is the impulse that animates these poems. “Give me tonight to be inconsolable,/so the death drive does not declare//itself, so…
Safia Elhillo: Interview
by Gaamangwe Mogami Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She received a BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and an MFA in poetry at the New School. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee, co-winner of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize, and winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize…
