In 2024, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Danez Smith discusses their curatorial approach and their own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, senior content editor at the Academy, and I’m here today with the Guest Editor for August, Danez Smith. Danez is the author of Bluff and Homie. Danez, welcome and thank you.

Danez Smith: Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for this opportunity and gift.

Poets.org: Yes, yes. It’s a gift largely to us. Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for August?

Smith: All right, I have a little bit of a long answer for you that I took some time to write down, so please excuse my essay. When I think about poems, [I] think about Audre Lorde and Pat Parker sending letters back and forth filled with gossip, love, updates, heartbreaks, advice, recommendations, and sometimes a little bit of money. I think of poetry being a bridge to one of the trade secret pleasures: the kinship of other poets. We often first meet in the poem or in the work, but often the poem becomes the friendship, or the friendship becomes the poem and is blessed by the close attention of two poets, two scribes of witness attending to it, nurturing it.

When I think of poems, I also think about the legend of Gwendolyn Brooks. I think of her at Fisk University at a conference surrounded by young people who would shift her mind and radicalize her practice. I think of this Pulitzer Prize winner being galvanized by young poets and activists who said that literature was not a luxury, but a tool for our collective survival and liberation. I think about Brooks going on to open her home to get poets in Chicago for weekly workshops, opening her doors to emerging poets like Haki Madhubuti, who would fill her home with their young energy and wisdom. I think about that line blurring between student and teacher, how a classroom becomes a community.

And I also think about poems and in my mind comes open mics and poetry slams, and writing community circles, and teaching artists bringing poems to schools and senior centers and prisons, and poems at the rally, and poems at church, and poems on stage at a community festival, and poems through a megaphone at a protest, and poems where you might at least expect to see poets. I think of the large wide world of poetry outside of traditional publishing. I think of poets who write on the page but also write in the air.

And so when I thought of Poem-a-Day and how to fill these morning offerings at the altar of poetry, I thought about poets who embody these community-focused models of poetry for me. I could have filled a year with poets who my heart called forward, but these twenty-two are a small whisper of what my heart feels when I think about poems. Here is a mix of surely friends and teachers, and students who became teachers, and poets I’ve admired for years at the back of open mics, poets who I’ve seen get on the mic and rip a hole in the universe with their words. These are poets who witness themselves, their worlds, their peoples with a rare vision and grace.

There are first-ever publications in this month. There are favorite poets of mine and maybe a new favorite of yours. These are poets across the country, and also there’s a good amount of poets from the Twin Cities, which is the place where I was born and raised, and that made me a poet today. I really wanted this month to represent what I think is the necessary communal tapestry of poetry. And so these are poets that my heart calls forward when I think about how to build my corner of that quilt. I send them to you reader as love letters all month long.

Poets.org: Wonderful. You mentioned a couple of Black Arts Movement poets there, Gwendolyn Brooks and Haki Madhubuti. The first time you and I worked together, albeit indirectly, was when I was at Library of America working on the Lift Every Voice project, and you gave that outstanding reading of the Melvin Dixon poem “Heartbeats.” Can you tell us something about what that generation of Black gay male writers has meant to you as a Black poet?

Smith: I think … I just did a talk about Melvin Dixon’s name [sic] and was largely focused on Essex Hemphill and Assotto Saint. Those poets have meant the world for me I think. I feel part of a generation of writers who were largely left uneldered in many ways. HIV and AIDS took out so many of that generation of artists and makers in the eighties and nineties into current day. The medication has advanced and, you know, there’s a lot more of us living with HIV today and able to live long lives with a little less worry.

But especially when I first became positive, I think there were so many queer poets of that generation that I was already familiar with, but it was as if I was pulled into deeper community with them through the diagnosis. And I was so grateful that they wrote so brazenly about their lives and about the lives of the community around them, that they wrote with honesty and ferocity and great joy and possibility and also great sorrow and grief that felt real and attended to.

So yeah, I think I’m very indebted to those poets because if they had not wrote through … so eloquently through the joys and chaoses of their lives, I don’t think I would’ve had a roadmap of how to continue living.

Poets.org: And what are you reading right now?

Smith: I am reading a lot of student work, which is always [laughs] fantastic. And I love reading my students’ work. They’re incredible folks.

I am reading … I just finished, I published a review recently, for God Bless You, Otis [Spunkmeyer] by Joseph Earl Thomas. It is a fantastic novel, that it very, stream-of-consciousness, but not without its intention, a truly unwieldy and wild read that I truly love.

And then in terms of poetry, I’ve been teaching a lot. And so I’ve been dipping in and out of favorite collections and seeing what to bring forth for my students. And I really have been loving the last couple of months teaching the work of Eve L. Ewing, both the books 1919 and Electric Arches continue to be great pools of knowledge and wealth to pull from for students. And so it’s been very fun to … as I’m teaching, to just go into both of her books and be reminded of how brilliant of a visionary she is.

Poets.org: Indeed. So you’ve just written a review, and you’re teaching a lot. What else are you working on and you’re writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Smith: I have a new book, Bluff, getting ready to come out, so that is on my mind. And in terms of work, it means I’m going to be on a lot of planes, so thinking about that and what it means to just bring a new book into the world. And I’m very excited to see how this book affects folks.

I am also just writing all the things. I’m always writing poems. I’m writing a lot of weird poems about time. I’m finishing up work on a play that will be staged sometime this fall. And I am also in the beginning stages of writing a new novel. I feel nervous saying that out loud, but I’m trying to write this novel.

And also just trying to live life. I feel part of the work of the writer is also just to attend to the self. The end of 2022 was filled with a lot of grief that I think I’m just getting over. Or not 2022, sorry, 2023 was filled with a lot of grief, a lot of death close to me. That, you know, can sometimes send us spiraling. And I feel like, in a lot of ways, I’m just coming out of that cloud and that fog, and so a part of my work as a writer is to attend to my heart for a little bit and see where it’s sitting at, and go forward. Yeah.

Poets.org: Well, I hope that the rest of this year offers you much more peace …

Smith: Thank you.

Poets.org: … Than you had last year. And we are very grateful for this curation. A lot of voices that I think will be new to this audience. So thank you for your contribution this August. Busy, busy! I hope you enjoy your summer.

Smith: [laughs] I’m having a good time so far this summer.

Poets.org: Good.

Smith: Yeah, it’s a great time. And I’m so excited for August, it’s my favorite month. It’s my birthday. So, so excited to live in the poems this month. I can’t wait to see how people respond to all this work. Like you said, it’s a lot of new poets, and so I hope that if these names are unfamiliar with you, that you will dive into the treasure troves of work that so many of them have waiting for you.

Poets.org: Thank you so much for joining me, Danez.

Smith: Thank you.