In 2026, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Dorianne Laux discusses her curatorial approach and her own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, editorial director at the Academy, and I’m here today with the Guest Editor for April, National Poetry Month, former Chancellor Dorianne Laux. Dorianne is the author most recently of Life on Earth. Dorianne, welcome and thank you for joining me today.

Laux: Oh, thank you so much, Mary. It’s great to see your face again.

Poets.org: Likewise. Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for National Poetry Month?

Laux: Well, you know, I made a list of poets that I love, and many of those included former students who have become great and wonderful poets, and poet friends, poets I had never met before but admired their work, you know, and thought, well, this is a chance to interact with this poet that I’ve never met before. And I just made that list and then honed it down to a list I felt I could live with. I mean, that meant leaving out so many people. But I also looked back at the Poem-a-Day by other editors to see what poems they had picked, and that helped me kind of look at, you know, different aspects of it and what Poem-a-Day is looking for.

Poets.org: Now, if you could direct our readers and listeners to one poem or more than one poem on Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?

Laux: Oh, was it Kwame Dawes’s “Purple” that I chose? Because I love that poem. And I think it was on Poem-a-Day, but I’m not sure who was the curator that year. Do you, by any chance?

Poets.org: I don’t know. I’m not even sure if that was specifically a Poem-a-Day poem, but I am familiar with “Purple.” Yes. It’s a popular Father’s Day poem.

Laux: Yes, it is a very popular Father’s Day [poem]. Is that coming up anytime soon?

Poets.org: Yes, in June.

Laux: Yeah, so that’s coming up. So maybe do you want me to read that poem by him?

Poets.org: If you’d like, sure.

Laux: Oh, really? Great. Because I love reading Kwame Dawes’s poems [laughs]: “Purple. Walking, I drew my hand over the lumpy / bloom of a spray of purple; I stripped away / my fingers, stained purple; put it to my nose, // the minty honey, a perfume so aggressively / pleasant. I gave it to you to smell, / my daughter, and you pulled away as if // I was giving you a palm full of wasps, / deceptions: ‘Smell the way the air / changes because of purple and green.’ // This is the promise I make to you: / I will never give you a fist full of wasps, / just the surprise of purple and the scent of rain.”

Poets.org: Can you tell us a bit more about that choice?

Laux: I just love A: to read a father-daughter poem versus a father-son poem, which we have many of. There’s just something so compelling about it. And the fact that he tries to show her something beautiful and she doesn’t see it as beautiful. It’s in the eye of the beholder, in this case, the nose of the beholder, you know. And when he sees her pull away like that, it frightens him. He never wants to be somebody who offers her anything but love, beauty, kindness. And so he makes this promise. And as I talk about it, my eyes tear up. I just think what a wonderful father Kwame is. And he’s a wonderful father to poets. He has many, many students that have gone on—Chris Abani being one of them—and introduced us to so many great poets. He’s a good dad, good poetry dad.

Poets.org: Indeed. And also a former Chancellor of the Academy. Chris Abani, who was the Guest Editor for February, he and I talked quite a bit about his long-standing partnership with Kwame Dawes for that African poetry series.

Laux: Beautiful book. Yeah.

Poets.org: Yes, yes. Speaking of fatherhood, I want to shift a little bit to motherhood, which our readers and listeners will find is a common theme in your curation. Was there a particular reason why you organized your curation according to that theme?

Laux: Well, mothers and fathers, where would we be without them, you know? And they’re such wonderful, complex relationships we have with our children, with our parents, and they’re the reason we’re here. And no matter how much we love them or not, they influence who we become. And so I’m just always drawn to those poems. I have a number of friends that are new parents, you know, have newborns or toddlers. And it’s just so great to see someone you have parented in a way, you know, through poetry now having children of their own and understanding more about the world than they did when they were students in an MFA program, you know. I mean, this is a whole different thing that I did not prepare them for [laughs] at all. And I just think that they’re relationships worth exploring in poetry. And I don’t think it’s explored enough, and I don’t think it can ever be explored enough.

Poets.org: Agreed. What are you reading right now?

Laux: Oh, gosh. Well, right now I’m going to give a talk on Carolyn Forché. And so I’m rereading The Country Between Us. And then because I do have this bunny, unfortunately, a lot of what I’m reading is bunny literature. And [I] read a wonderful book by Chloe ... What is her last name? It’s sitting right up here somewhere. But … Chloe Dalton! And she wrote a book called Raising Hare. And she, like I, found a bunny outside in the wilderness. She found her little bunny, which was a rabbit, which are different from bunnies.* They can’t even mate. They’re different. They’re not quite different species, but they’re different something.

Poets.org: I did not know that.

Laux: I didn’t either. It’s very interesting to me, but a hare is a very different creature than a bunny. And she raised this hare. And it’s her first book, which pissed me off, you know, that somebody could write so well first time out. And she just writes this beautiful book about her hare. 

And another one called The Burrow. And I’m just going down the rabbit hole, you know, with my reading. I haven’t read a book of poems. I got Robert, was it Robert Wrigley’s new book called ... I don’t know, it has rabbit in the title, and there’s a picture of a rabbit running across it. And I bought that thinking, oh, read the whole book, not one rabbit poem. Water, Water. Maybe it was Billy Collins. Water, Water. Anyway, but other than that, oh, well, there’s one book that I love that I’ve reread recently, which is called Edith, which is by ... [To Joseph Millar] Honey, who’s Edith by? I’m asking my husband. He’s off-screen. He’s my hard drive. Meg Freitag. And it’s about a parakeet that she had that died. And many of the poems are conversations with her parakeet. And so you can see I’ve just left the human world completely. I’ve moved on to the animal kingdom.

Poets.org: I’m very curious about the particular interest in bunnies. Incidentally, I had a bunny when I was a very little girl. Yeah, when I was about five, I had a bunny. Why the particular interest in bunnies at this stage?

Laux: We have never wanted pets because we travel too much. We’re not very responsible people. [laughs] We’re introverts. And we just never wanted a pet, but a bunny got born in our backyard, and it was vulnerable to creatures, you know, that might kill it. So I brought it inside and I’d take it out and let its mom feed it every day for about four weeks until she refused to feed it any longer. And then I brought her in the house and raised her. And so the poem I read about the blessing was about that bunny that we raised. And she was about, I don’t know, one or two years old and mysteriously died suddenly. We don’t know why. We have no idea. I just came down and she was gone. And my husband and I mourned for two weeks straight; we could not stop crying. And we went to Pacific University where I teach poetry once a year. And on our way back, I told him to stop by the bunny shop, which was the bunny place where we would take our bunny to get her shots and all of that. And I saw another one that looked just like her, except it was a boy. So we brought him home and named him Odin. And now Odin is our second bunny. But the poem I read was for my first bunny, Little Grey, who ended up being called Lady Grey [laughs] because she—

Poets.org: Lady Grey?

Laux: Yeah. But it was completely by chance. We had no intention. And my husband was very adamant about it, that he didn’t want any pets. And when I brought that little bunny in that was as big as the palm of my hand and showed it to him, he fell in love. And I tell you, that man is a bunny wrangler. He now loves the bunny more than I do, which is quite a lot. [laughs] So it just happened, you know. It was meant to be.

Poets.org: So lovely. What are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Laux: You know, I’m writing a lot of bunny poems. I think bunnies just don’t get enough attention. No, I’m writing a lot of bunny poems. I work once a week with a group of poets, and we all throw out a bunch of words and [a] phrase and maybe a time of year or something. And then we all go away for forty minutes and write a poem and come back and read them to each other and give each other comments, usually not too dire because we’ve just written them. But it’s really useful. And I’ve probably got a whole book on my computer somewhere, but who knows where. But nothing in particular, you know. I’m not thinking of anything in particular right now in terms of ... And I hardly ever am. When I write a book, it’s just a hodgepodge until I show it to my husband. And then he goes, “Oh, well, you could make this a section and you could do this and that.” And he makes it into a book. I have no interest in making it into a book. I just write the poems because that’s my job. And then he kind of does the curating, you know.

Poets.org: I’m going to be a little nosy. I’m very curious about the group of friends with whom you meet to write poems. I know that Danusha Laméris is someone whom you interact with rather frequently, our March Guest Editor. Can you say who the other folks are in that Zoom meeting? Is it a rotation?

Laux: It sort of is. It’s become a rotation. It began during COVID when we were in North Carolina teaching. I was teaching there, Joe [Millar] was teaching at North Carolina State, and I was retiring. And our friend and former student, Tyree Daye, Leila Chatti … [To Millar] Who else, honey? [They] would come to this little group, and once a week we’d write poems together. And Matthew later ... Oh, Matthew Wimberley. And then later when we moved to California, Matthew Dickman and Michael Dickman started joining in, Major Jackson and Didi Jackson. For a long time, we had Sharon Olds, but then she got a little too trembly to be able to continue. [To Millar] And anybody else you can think of, hun?

But anyway, it’s rotating. Yeah, I mean, people come in and out, and some people will say, “Oh, well, can so-and-so come, my friend?” And we’ll say, “Sure, have them come on in.” But the core group has kind of stayed the same: Tyree, Major, and Didi. Who knows? And then there’s always times when somebody can’t, “Oh, we’re on tour, you know [laughs], or we’re seeing our parents,” or whatever, and then somebody else joins in. But Mike McGriff. Yeah, this is ridiculous because I can’t think of everybody who’s ... Because this has gone on since COVID. When was that?

Poets.org: 2020 to 2021.

Laux: 2020.

Poets.org: Yeah.

Laux: Yeah. And this is ’26, so this has gone, it has not stopped all that time. And like I say, I got Life on Earth out of it. I got a whole book out of that.

Poets.org: That’s great that you’ve been able to ... Some good things have come out of COVID, being able to form these communities virtually. I think at that time it served as a great source of comfort for people when they were self-quarantined. But I think with everything that’s happening now, which can still feel very, very isolating and scary, it’s great that you’ve been able to perpetuate it.

Laux: Well, not only that but a lot of these people were in different states, at times, different countries, and we were able to see them more than we would otherwise, you know, and actually see them and interact with them. And I mean, for as much as people don’t like Zoom or … hey, this is better than a phone call. You get to see the other person, see the steam from their tea wafting by. And in my case, smoke from my cigarette. I mean, it’s glorious. And see them in their environment and, “Oh, show me your backyard.” It’s great. I love it.

Poets.org: Sounds great. Thank you so much, Dorianne, for joining me this afternoon.

Laux: Thank you, sweetie.

 

*Bunny is a colloquial term used to refer affectionately to rabbits and has no scientific significance. The terms bunny and rabbit may be used interchangeably. In contrast, hares, as Laux later explains, are a different animal species.