In 2025, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Saretta Morgan 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, senior content editor at the Academy, and I am here today with the Guest Editor for February’s Poem-a-Day, Saretta Morgan. Saretta is the author of Alt-Nature. Saretta, welcome, and thank you for joining me today.

Saretta Morgan: Thank you for having me, Mary, and to everyone on the Academy’s team.

Poets.org: Fantastic. Let’s jump right in. How did you go about curating Poem-a-Day for February?

Morgan: Yes, thank you for that question. I’m really excited to talk about that. First, I just want to take a moment, when this interview airs in early February, we’ll be not even two months shy of Nikki Giovanni’s passing, and I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge her work and her accomplishments as a poet, and activist, and educator. I didn’t know Nikki Giovanni, but I know that she left a very rich archive of public works. And I just want to point to a couple of those.

The first being her 1971 interview with James Baldwin for Soul! productions [sic], which is one of my favorite recorded moments of Black American history, period, in which you have two Black queer, and I’m using that term loosely because I know the time, but Black queer literary legends role-playing heterosexuality in order to have a public conversation about Black love and Black family in the early 1970s when Black people were not inclined to air our dirty laundry, so to speak.

And she was twenty-eight years old, with the courage to say, “I want to speak to James Baldwin.” And the courage within a space of that interview to say to James Baldwin, “This is the conversation we’re going to have, this very difficult conversation.” It takes a lot of courage, and she made it look easy. And another kind of resource I would like to point people to is the 2023 documentary on her life, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, which I learned about from the poet and scholar L. Lamar Wilson.

And when Lamar, who is a longtime student and friend of Nikki Giovanni’s, and when Lamar sent me in a text message, shared that the film had been released, my first thought was, oh, I’m so glad that she’s being recognized in her lifetime. And Lamar, maybe in only a way that people who are close to her can do, said, “Yes, and it’s so important to realize that Nikki was really important in the film coming about, and very involved in its making.”

And that involvement was an extension of a lifetime of creating a public image, and writing herself into history. And doing that through, the way Lamar put it to me was, a gift for really understanding the moment, and creating a movement through being present, and vulnerable, and answerable in genuine relationships with people across different generations.

And the last thing that I will point to is an essay in the L.A. Times that Lamar wrote within days of her passing. And I think the essay is really a testament to the kind of impact she has on an individual level, and also an example of how sincere meaningful mentorship acts to extend one’s own archive. And that that’s a way that Black history can take place and take shape. And I think that that’s something that Nikki Giovanni knew and really practiced.

And I’ll leave that there, just with so much thanks and gratitude to her, and her life, and the people who carry it forward. And we can move into our interview.

So to the question, how did I approach curating? I was really inspired by Danez Smith’s Guest Editor interview to prepare a written statement. So I will read from that, and then we can move forward from there.

I’ll begin with a question from the writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, the opening lines from his 2023 essay, “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide.” Fargo asks, “What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide?” When I read this question for the first time, I felt that a portal had opened onto a field where thinking was possible. I’ve carried this question still unanswered for more than a year now, bringing it into workshops and classrooms, sharing with friends.

When my first book of poems was published in February ’24, I inscribed Fargo’s words into the book as a second epigraph, and began public readings with notes from his essay. In approaching February’s Poem-a-Day curation, I offered Fargo’s essay to twenty poets and asked them to sit inside of its opening lines with me as a frame to be alongside each other, to remain within a recognition of responsibility, even if articulating the contours of that responsibility remains impossible from here.

The following words from [Êdouard] Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse often return to my mind, “[T]he attempt to approach a reality so often hidden from view cannot be organized in terms of a series of clarifications.” End quote.

Many of us are poets because the politics we feel in our bodies can’t be expressed in the languages we’re given to share. As readers and writers, we turn to poetry because we believe Glissant’s claim to be true, though as opposed to hidden, it may at this point be more accurate to say that the reality is thoroughly saturating.

I begin most days with a basic question, how do I prepare my body for the language I need to arrive? Writers writing in English, reproducers of a national language in a genociding [sic] state, how do we begin to prepare ourselves in physical and ongoing ways to navigate the empire’s core, to strike from there, or to recognize the literary practices that instead extend its reach?

I didn’t expect this month’s poets to answer these questions for me, but I wanted to know what they’d say. Speaking from a range of experiences and lived commitments to language, language to map the nightmare that is the United States, or to address the politics of translation on and off the page, to remain present in the testing grounds of language, which are our lives, when there is very little money, language that allows us to return to our bodies and to reach forward with an ethics of care, for a language that might be meaningful today.

To this month’s readers, I hope that you hold their words and my own with the care and criticality that poetry requires. To the poets who’ve contributed, I want to thank you for thinking with me in this moment of genocide.

Poets.org: Firstly, I want to thank you for that very beautiful tribute to Nikki Giovanni. That conversation that she had with James Baldwin for public television back in the early 1970s is also one of my favorite conversations to watch, between two immensely thoughtful activists and writers.

The Tbakhi essay, for the edification of our readers, was published in Protean Magazine on December 8, 2023, and it expands on remarks that were delivered as part of the Palestine as a Craft question panel at the Radius of Arab American Writers, otherwise known as RAWI, a fest that was held in Minneapolis on October 27, and included the poets George Abraham, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Deema K. Shehabi, and Noor Hindi.

The essay critiques our adherence to craft as a value system, arguing that craft is also responsible for instructing us about how to think of Palestine and Israeli people. Personally, when I consider this juxtaposition, I think of reading certain news headlines and how those headlines describe the uprising in Ukraine, versus the decimation of Palestinian communities in Gaza.

At the same time, both readers and writers have respect and dedication to form as a practice. So in your opinion, how can a young poet, for example, navigate this difficulty of challenging systems that may be complicit in genocide, while also trying to be writers, yes, and following the rules of form to remain accessible to audiences, though it is these very systems that teach us form and how to access it?

Morgan: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it has to do with which audiences you want to be accessible to. I think what I’ve learned to value as an instructor of writing is not to teach people craft. I actually ask students to step as far away from analyzing texts and trying to figure out what it was that a writer was trying to do, or how they’ve achieved something, to step as far away from that as you can. And instead, ask how language makes you feel. And what does that feeling make possible?

There was something else I was going to say…. Oh, and in terms of accessibility, accessibility to whom? I mean, there’s a very good reason for remaining accessible to institutions, and it’s that they fund writing lives, right? If we can afford to live, you know, “writerly” lives, it’s probably because we work for a university or we’re getting grants from, I mean, honestly, the tax-diverting foundations of war profiteers and environmental terrorists.

So there is a kind of material benefit to remaining legible to those systems. But if you want to be accessible to the people in your lives, then that requires a different kind of thought around craft. Lately, I was telling my girlfriend a couple of weeks ago, I was like, what is the book that I can write that my mother would be interested [in], on her own accord, not because I’m her daughter and she loves me? What is the book that she would pick up?

And I mean, with my mother it would probably be like a devotional text or something like that. But how do I get as close to that aesthetic and that language as possible while still staying grounded in the things that are important to me? That’s a question I’m asking myself right now. And I think all writers should really be asking, who is it that I want to be legible to? Finances aside, esteem aside, who do I want to be able to access me? And what am I doing to make that happen?

Poets.org: If you could direct readers to one poem, or more than one, in our collection at Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be, and why?

Morgan: If I had to point to one poem, it would be JJJJJerome Ellis’s “Instructions Before Stuttering,” for the way that JJJJJerome really brings attention to the consequences of language moving through a particular body. And I think, in the context of Jerome’s work as a whole, you can see those consequences really mapped onto a social field that’s also entangled with not only our human histories, but an active presence of nonhuman worlds as well. And I would also go further to say that I highly recommend JJJJJerome’s recent collection, Aster of Ceremonies, for those same reasons.

Poets.org: And what are you reading now?

Morgan: I’m reading a few things right now, some by myself and some with others, which I haven’t done in a while. And I’m really, really glad to be re-incorporating that into my practice. So right now I’m reading a lot of Etel Adnan’s work with my girlfriend, Ica Sadagat. And also, LaTasha Diggs’s Village, which I’m reading with a large group of writers who are kind of just held together by a mutual admiration of LaTasha’s work, and her just way of being a poet in the world.

And then I’m reading Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim, with my brother in poetry, Douglas Kearney. Then on my own, a lot of Ed Roberson’s work, Hortense Spillers, always, and Kendrick Lamar’s GNX is giving me a lot right now. And the artist Beverly Buchanan, who didn’t publish a lot, though in her archives, there is a lot of really poignant poetic language. But mostly sitting with the work that curators and art historians have written about her work and visual practice. And then, also just sitting with her physical sculptures as well. I’m lucky to live within a few hours of some of her environmental sculptures in Georgia, and they’re just stunning on their own, but I think her work really asks for viewers to bring a strong sense of presence to the landscapes that they’re situated in. And so, I’m really trying to make a practice of that in terms of becoming closer to her and her practice, just literally sitting with the work, and just seeing what rises in that practice.

Poets.org: So Beverly Buchanan, for those in our audience who don’t know, as you just briefly mentioned, was a visual artist who worked with a variety of media and dealt very much with the Southern vernacular. She spent time also in the Northeast and died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but identified very deeply with the South.

And she has a sculpture series known as Shacks, which references the improvised communities that Black people erected in the South after Reconstruction. Of course, you’re based in Atlanta, and I’ve noticed about your work that you sometimes integrate visual artifacts into it, which, like Buchanan, also contemplates landscapes. I would even say that your work is in the recent tradition of material ecocriticism, which examines material forms in relation to human and nonhuman forces, as well as in relation to other matter. But I’m curious, broadly, about what the influence, if any, that ecocriticism and environmental activism might have on your work?

Morgan: Yeah, I mean, I think maybe the simplest way for me to answer that question is to point to a lecture that Hortense Spillers gave, I think at, I could be wrong, at York College.* I’m not really sure. But it was a lecture that she gave to a group of students who had recently read her “The Idea of Black Culture.”

And in it she positions Black culture as critical culture. And in explaining what that means, she’s like, “In terms of critical, what is the thing that has to happen right now? What is the most urgent thing?” And for her, that was saving the planet, getting the planet into the hands of people who are capable of taking care of it. And I think that that’s something that I think about as a part of being in the world right now, aside from being a writer, aside from being someone interested in art or literature. I think something we all have to be asking is, what is my role in that critical project? And I think everything else comes from there.

Poets.org: And what are you currently working on in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Morgan: Yeah, so I don’t teach anywhere regularly, but I did have the opportunity this past semester to teach in the MFA program at Arizona State University, through their Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. And it was a really great experiment in thinking about how to form a pedagogy around value-centered writing, and getting students to identify and then live out their values, and pay attention to what is the language that emerges through that process.

And so, yeah, that’s something I’m thinking about in terms of teaching, and how do I continue that project and learn from the lessons that I moved through working with that group of students. I think, yeah, one of the challenges is just helping writers to step away from the idea that there’s something that they’re supposed to know about a piece of literature, as opposed to foregrounding what something feels like inside of them, what it means to them just on a very physical, primal, guttural level [laughs]. So that’s what I’ll say about teaching.

In terms of my writing right now, I spent a lot of my writing time thinking about how to prepare myself for writing. And so right now, just as a person who is really invested in the connection between mind and body, a lot of my attention is just thinking about how do I get my body to work as best as possible? And so, thinking a lot about muscle health and digestion, so like foam rolling, eating vegetables, cupping, massage, taking my little supplements. I’m really kind of shocked at, and I am still very early in my writing journey, but I shocked that I made it this far without receiving instruction around just how do you help your body think? How do you help your body process? I don’t understand why all MFA programs don’t have a curriculum around that. It’s such important information for writers to share with each other and for writers to have the resources for wellness to be sharing with other writers.

So that is kind of the internal moment. And in terms of the social supports for my writing right now, I’ve been studying capoeira, which also leads into how I’m learning to move. And also volunteering with [a] wild bird rehab. So just literally learning how to take care of other bodies in my environment.

And those aren’t things that I write about, and those aren’t spaces that I talk about writing in. I’m not at the hoda [sic] talking about poems, or at the rehab center talking about literature. But I know the impact that those activities have on my ability to think and feel, and I know how critical that is for my writing process.

In terms of literal time spent writing, like pen to paper, finger to keyboard, a lot of my attention has been directed toward collaborative projects right now. And I feel very grateful for that, that writing is actually providing opportunities for me to connect with people that I care about and deepen those relationships.

One project, the thing I guess that I’m thinking about most, because it’s coming up soon, is I’m cowriting a lecture on Etel Adnan with the writer Ica Sadagat. And that is for a symposium, to celebrate the hundredth year anniversary of a Etel Adnan’s birth. [The] symposium is going to be at the Poetry Project in New York City at the end of February. And it’s curated by the writer Omar Berrada—writer and translator, Omar Berrada. And it’s called In the Rhythms of the World: Celebrating Etel Adnan’s Life and Work.

So for fans of Etel Adnan’s work, for people who are curious about Etel Adnan’s work, definitely check out that symposium. It’ll be at the Poetry Project February 28 and March 1, with a film screening at Anthology [Film] Archive[s] the night before that, so February 27. And I’m really looking forward to that and just being in community with people who are also moved by the incredible work that Etel left for us.

Poets.org: Thank you for that tip. And thank you also for this very deep and enriching conversation. And thank you for serving as Guest Editor for February.

Morgan: Yeah, yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah, it was a great opportunity.

*“The Idea of Black Culture” was published in CR: The New Centennial Review in winter 2006. Spillers gave a lecture on the essay at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, on March 19, 2013.