In 2026, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Chris Abani discusses his curatorial approach and his 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 February, Chris Abani. Chris is the author of Smoking the Bible and the coeditor with our former Chancellor Kwame Dawes of Kumi: New Generation African Poets, a Chapbook Box Set. Chris, welcome and thank you so much for joining me.

Chris Abani: Thank you. Thank you, Mary. Thank you for asking me to do this, and thank you for talking to me today.

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

Abani: Well, I guess I’m an avid reader of the series myself. And also because of the work we do for African Poetry Book Fund, I’m always looking for new poets, new writers who the public doesn’t always know. I’m trying to find ways to center translations more. So all of these were running through my mind, but I’m also aware the world of poetry kind of moves in waves. And so there’s so many amazing poets that kind of come in and out, like waves literally come in and out of consciousness. So I was really looking for even some more established or well-known poets who haven’t always sort of stayed central to things because of life and everything. So it was really trying to find work that is cohesive in that however you approach this, I was sort of thinking of a poetry book. So however you approach it, you kind of can make an arc of the poems, or if you just wanted to dip in once, you would have a good poem.

And I wanted the voices to be as varied as possible from new poets people had never heard of, to poets that are well established, but also to styles that people don’t even think should be juxtaposed together. So it’s really just trying to create a curation that gives us an introduction to the profoundly varied and depth in terms of the ineffableness of things that contemporary American poetry has to offer.

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?

Abani: Well, I think it’s for people who know me, it’s no secret that I really look to Yusef Komunyakaa as a kind of poet who functions both as mentor in many ways. It was so incredible when I got to meet him in person, but there’s so much of art or so much of being, for myself being African, generational conversations are so important, and you’re linked within a tradition to elders. And I don’t even use that word based on age. It’s just based on how ... It’s not even vintage, but, you know, like well-aged wine, how profound and strong and amazing an aesthetic is. And so I remember years and years ago encountering a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa, which is called “Ode to a Drum.” And it’s just transformative, both from how it takes this idea of the old. So it is a praise song, but it’s a prayer; it’s an incantation; it’s an ars poetica; it’s a refusal to be eradicated.

It is a restatement of purpose. I mean, and I memorized it years ago and I used to go, whenever I did a poetry [reading] I would begin my reading by reading this poem to the audience saying, This is the bar I want to measure myself against. And one day in Seattle of all places, I was reading it and I looked at it in the audience and there was Yusef Komunyakaa sitting there and it was a wonderful thing. So “Ode to a Drum” by Yusef is amazing. And that then led me down the rabbit hole of Yusef’s work. And what I always recommend to readers of poetry, whether it’s a casual reader, but more so the practitioner, is the idea of the depth of study, that you don’t read a poem. If you find a poem you love, you read the oeuvre of that poet. You read every book, every poem, you go deep, you go wide. And consistently, I have read everything this man has ever written, and I’m a poet myself. So even with poetry collections, there are poets that may have twenty books of poems. And you know like five of those needed to exist and the other fifteen were like, look what I can do. I’m guilty of this, but I haven’t found a poem or a book by Yusef that didn’t need to exist. And the range of styles he covers, you can see it reflected in that one poem. So I knew [the] vernacular, he’s talking a lot about, so he’s sort of using that idea of the performance poem, which suppose in a way links to the griots of Africa. But even in that one poem, “Ode to a Drum,” you can see he’s not into the Caribbean poets like Kamau Braithwaite, who would’ve been sort of not even a peer, maybe just a little ahead of him.

So again, it sort of is this one poem that centers around truly, it’s an entirely African American experience. That’s what’s driving it, but it is one of the most cosmopolitan and internationally Black poems; at the core of it is Africa and then all the diasporas. So that one poem alone is a kind of poem that if you ever wrote as a poet and never wrote anything again, you would’ve redeemed your entire life. That’s the poem I want people to read.

Poets.org: That’s such a great story, seeing Komunyakaa in the audience in Seattle [laughs]. How novel an anecdote. Komunyakaa has recently contributed to Poem-a-Day. He was part of Garrett Hongo’s curation in May of last year. So we have had the pleasure of seeing some recent work from him because he doesn’t produce, of course, as much as he used to. My favorite poem of his on our website is “Facing It,” which I think is such—

Abani: Yes! Sorry to interrupt you. Yes.

Poets.org: No, it’s okay. Go on.

Abani: I teach this poem all the time. So I try to tell poets who are working, students of mine and other poems I’m working with that at the center of every successful poem is what I call the artifact. It’s an object, and it’s the object that carries the most symbolic value for the entire poem and that every other object in the poem strikes the central object. And so when Yusef is doing this poem, the conflation of the body with the object, which is the war memorial, it starts, “My black face fades, / [hiding] inside the black granite.” And I’m like, “What the hell are you doing, man?” And so it’s this constant movement, really how he renders the body, the Black body into a national monument and restores all the erased Black vets, but just moves.

There’s a really amazing drum solo called “Mr. Hi-Hat” by, I think it’s Alvin Jones, who used to be called Coltrane’s drummer, but I could be wrong. It could be Elvin Jones. So it’s basically—

Poets.org: Elvin.

Abani: It’s Elvin, right? And it’s just the hi-hats, the symbols. And he just plays it down the stick, down the stem of it and back up with ... But it’s this idea that every turn you make, you strike and every strike creates a reverberation that while that is still reverberating, you’re striking, but you’re only striking one simple object. And so there’s places in the poem where he says, “I said I wouldn’t, / dammit: No tears.” And just the use of the word, it’s spelled like the act, like a dam, D-A-M-M-I-T. And then he’s got this cult. I mean, you could unpack this. I’m so glad you loved this poem. This is what I’m talking about, the craft, the subtlety. There’s so many poets that are generationally that are fantastic, but as a Black man, to find the amount of tenderness and no sentimentality. Anyway, sorry, sorry, please go back to what you were saying. [laughs]

Poets.org: No, because you said it so much better than I would have. I think you’ve said everything about it. It’s a very compact poem, but you’re absolutely right. There’s so much going on within it.

Abani: Yeah, God, it’s amazing.

Poets.org: What are you reading right now?

Abani: Well, so the thing about, so I'm reading ... It’s so interesting that for a long time I haven’t actually had the pleasure of reading for pleasure. I teach full-time at Northwestern and I do occasional low-residency programs. So I’m working with poets all the time. So I’m reading. And the thing about that is it doesn’t matter where the poet is in their career, you will always find something unexpected that kind of reassures you that the poetry is really powerful in the way it works in the world. I do a lot of contests and I just recently read for, I think it’s called the National ... It’s not the National Poetry Series. It’s another poetry series, but the focus is national. And I’m saying this because I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say what I was doing because it’s a prize that hasn’t been announced yet.

But I read like sixty entries, and it was hard to even get ten finalists. They were so good. But then there was this moment when this one ... You hit this one manuscript and you’re like, where has this voice been? So I’m reading a lot of that. I’m reading a lot of work for the African Poetry Book Fund, which is always infinitely humbling because you’re reading a range of submissions from across a continent. But then we’ve been doing this for a while, so you’re reading also poets that are in conversation themselves with other poets in that series. And so you start to realize that there’s a whole kind of macro/ microcosm of poetry developing that you have had the privilege of looking in on, so to speak. And then we run another chapbook contest at Northwestern I do with Susannah Gottlieb called The Drinking Gourd, which is for a chapbook for poets of color. And we’ve had really major poets have come through from there, Nicole Sealey, others. And so I’ve been just most recently reading, we had a hundred or so submissions and I had to pick four finalists and we had to decide on one winner. So that’s hard. But yeah, so that’s what I’ve been reading mostly. 

And then because I have the privilege of teaching poetry in many different ways, I then have had the privilege of indulging and rereading my favorites. I teach literature as a whole. So I’ve been rereading almost everyone. And then to find, as I’m trying to teach people to write about poetry, I find myself returning to early Jane Hirshfield work, how to write about poetry. And I’m trying to get people to see poetry [as] spiritual in the sense of the psychological dimension of self, and some of her work is really good for that.

You find yourself back with Sharon Olds, you find yourself back with David St. John, whose book Hush, which I think won the National Poetry Series in 1974,* you’re reading this book again, and every time I revisit it, I’m kind of moved in this way. And also I was reading some of Percival Everett’s new poems. So people don’t know that Percival Everett is also an amazing poet, and I’ve had the privilege of publishing two of his collections when I edited the Black Goat series for Akashic. So yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been immersing myself in other people’s explosions of creativity, and it’s wonderful.

Poets.org: I did not know that Percival Everett was a poet. I only knew him as a prose writer.

Abani: No, he’s an amazing, amazing poet, really sort of in the Jorie Graham kind of experimental places. But there’s something just personable about everything Percival does. And so it’s a different ... I had the privilege. He used to be my professor when I was doing my PhD at USC, and he was hanging out with this guy waiting for a reading, and then there’s a piano in the room, and he starts playing. And then you realize, wait, this guy plays a piano. He plays a guitar. He paid his way through college as a session musician. He teaches ... A couple of summers I knew he was teaching painting at the Sorbonne. He writes this incredible love for us. He is a fantastic photographer. So these people, you’re just like, “You know, I hate you. I love you so much.” [laughs]

Poets.org: [laughs] I understand the feeling.

Abani: Yeah. Oh, this is the incredible gift that life sometimes gives you is that it puts you in the proximity of just splendor, you know?

Poets.org: Indeed.

Abani: Yeah.

Poets.org: Yeah. Speaking of which, I wanted to ask you a bit more about that chapbook series that you’ve been working on with Kwame Dawes since 2014 now, right?

Abani: Yes.

Poets.org: Yes. And it’s interesting because I think in the American literary landscape, when we think about mainstream African writers, we tend not to think of poets, we tend to think more so of prose writers, including some of my favorites, people like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Imbolo Mbue … These people have become best-selling authors, which is wonderful. But I think that poetry from the African continent, to me anyway, still seems rather marginal, which makes the work that you and Kwame do so important. But I’m very curious about how the two of you came up with this idea to start this project. And what have you learned from doing it for the past twelve years?

Abani: Well, first of all, Kwame and I go back. I think that Kwame and I met in 1995 in the U.K. Kwame used to come over and then Bernardine Evaristo, who everybody now knows, used to run an arts organization called Spread the Word. And so there’s a lot of Black poets in the U.K. at the time who had no mentorship. So Kwame was to come over and he set up something called the Afro Style School of Poetry, and there were these great workshops. And out of those workshops, I emerged, Bernardine emerged, Patience Agbabi, I mean, Roger Robinson, also everybody that everybody knows … Malaika Booker, we all came out of that initial intervention. And so when Kwame would come over, Kwame was staying with family that were near me. So he and I rode the train in and out all the time, and so we developed a relationship.

And so after that had disbanded, I had moved to the U.S. Kwame was in South Carolina and he was running his own chapbook series for local South Carolina poets that nobody knew. And then I had started Black Goat with the blessings of Akashic Books, which was [an] amazing publisher because they do fiction and nonfiction. And then this is crazy poets. So he’d consider, I want to do a series of poems that people wouldn’t publish from writers people don’t expect. And I’m like, sure. So I guess we came to a full run of those things we were doing. And then we were on a tour together in South Africa in the early days when the Poetry Africa festival would do these Southern Africa tours. And so we were on the road with Lebo Mashile, the great Lebo Mashile, TJ Dema, you know, and a few other poets. And it was what we called the “Babylon by Bus Talk,” because literally we would fly to a country and then use a bus to go to all the venues locally.

And we were just floored by the poetry we were encountering that no one had ever heard of. There were no workshops, there were no libraries for these kids. There was no access to publishing. There were a couple of things online, but there weren’t book chances. And so we thought, here’s traditionally, because everyone views a novel as a nation-building thing, there’d all been these series of fiction, the African writers series, which [Chinua] Achebe used to edit and then Abdulrazak Gurnah took over, but nobody for poetry. And so it seemed like really the developments in poetry seemed to disappear around the time Christopher Okemwa died, which is in the sixties. And then Kofi Awoonor, and there were all these poets still working, but they had kind of ... Africa’s always in the news, and then when we’re not in the news, everybody forgets the way they exist.

So we thought we should figure out a way to publish the younger African poets and introduce them to a global audience. And it’s not in the way that there’s one anthology every twenty years, but in a kind of book format and have it generate. And so that was really where it was born. And then through some amazing interventions of luck and just, you know, corralling a bunch of people to work for us for free, we’ve been able to do this and the response has been amazing. 

What have we learned? Wow. Well, first of all, the one thing I’ve always believed, but it’s being confirmed in the process is that writers are really the curators of a culture’s humanity. It’s really where you will find everything you need to know about a culture. Science is fine, it’s useful, but there’s something about writers. So in a way, when you look at a novel, it has to follow rules of chronology and progressive narration, which poetry doesn’t. And so poetry can make all these leaps. So in one poem, you can go through continents and time periods. And so we’ve really come to learn not only, of course, the amazing range of humanity we have to express, but to have people who live in particular regions of the world or regions of the continent where to speak out your sexuality alone has tremendous cost, risking that and coming out in these books that we get to publish.

And so there’s an explosion of humanness, there’s an explosion of styles, there’s a curation and a reclamation of language. We’re learning all this as we go along, but we’re learning that there is now a whole generation of young poets, some of them who reside here now, like Ladan Osman and Safia Elhillo, my cousin. And so all of these people who we here think of as young poets are actually elders to a whole generation of other poets. And so this dream, I think, that people like the boys had and Marcus Garvey had, and which Kwame and I grew up in, which was kind of pan-African dream, that Blackness is a global Blackness. And the only thing that has been in the way has been access and oceans. And so now with tech and with things that are affordable, what I have come to learn is that there is such a thing as a Black consciousness that exists across the world and that once one spots the other, the recognition generates this amazing kind of material.

Sorry, I tend to ramble a lot. I should stop talking. [laughs]

Poets.org: No, this is all wonderful and I appreciate it deeply. What are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life? Though I feel like we’ve kind of answered that question already. [laughs]

Abani: Well, I have had the privilege of about having sixteen books in multiple genres and styles in the world. And so I started to ask myself, if I was going to publish something new, it had to be a book that must exist. Like I had to come to the conviction myself that it must exist. And so I’ve noticed that I generate work all the time and I’m like, “Hey, this is just another shade of the other thing you did.” Because I’ve been looking at different writers. So I think of someone like Jack Gilbert, and I think about, you know, The Great Fires, and I think about Refusing Heaven, and I think about this man’s entire career really summed up by these two books. And I think of women like people like Wole Soyinka, who has this beautiful book of essays called Myth, Literature and the African World. So I want to be able to write books that must exist and that they don’t exist because I can do them. They don’t exist because I’m intrigued by them. They exist because I need them and therefore there are people who need them. So that’s slowed my public presentation of work quite a bit, but I am working on a novel, that much I can say. And then there’s a collection of poems that is emerging, and maybe in six months it might be ready. 

But it’s also like I came to fatherhood late. I’m an old man. And so right after a toddler, I’m so exhausted. Who has time for poetry? But then also when I look at this consciousness, this amazing child, blossoming, I feel like, yeah, the world can wait a few more years. There’s enough Chris Abani in the world. Let’s live this moment, you know. So I don’t know if that answers the question. [laughs]

Poets.org: It does. It does. I’ve enjoyed spending time reading your most recent collection, but I think you’ve provided us with a [laughs] robust body of work in terms of both poetry and novels, which you’ve been publishing since you were very, very young. So I think we can wait another couple of years. [laughs]

Abani: Well, I did give one poem to Khaled for the community.

Poets.org: Yes, you did. That’s right. [laughs]

Abani: So there’s no fear that there’s no work. It’s just like I’m being more considered about how I release and what I release.

Poets.org: Indeed. Well, thank you so much for this time and all of these wonderful stories. I think our audience will appreciate them as well.

Abani: Oh, thank you, Mary. Thank you so much.

 

*David St. John’s Hush was issued as the second selection of Houghton Mifflin’s “New Poetry Series,” in 1976.