In 2025, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Omotara James 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. My name is Mary Sutton. I’m senior content editor at the Academy, and I’m here today with our Guest Editor for June, Omotara James. Omotara is the author of Song of My Softening, which was recently nominated for an NAACP Award, and was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award. Omotara, welcome and thank you for joining me.
James: Thank you for having me.
Poets.org: Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for June, which is both Pride Month, as many of us know, and Caribbean Heritage Month?
James: Yes. There’s so much happening in June, and I was so excited that that would serve as the container for this curation, the same way the poem serves as the container for the message, right? I love June. It’s summer. It’s Pride Month. There’s Father’s Day. There’s Juneteenth. There’s so many intersecting holidays. And I find in June that, you know, I’m usually very tired. I think of that Anne Sexton poem about the death of her parents, where she says, It’s June, and I’m tired of being brave. There’s something about June that feels so visceral, and I knew that I wanted poems and poets who are speaking from places of passion, from places of deep interrogation, poets who are speaking to the urgencies of today and the body in all of its forms.
So I try to think about the Poem-a-Day poems that I read, that I receive in my emails, and I’m so excited for those poems because they serve as an inoculation for the day. They’re one of the first things that I read; and after I wake up, I’m going into the syntax of the world, the syntax of the news, the syntax of current events, and the wonderful thing about receiving a poem first thing in the morning is that it’s an escape. It’s a rescue from that syntax. It’s a rescue from the mundane. It’s like it reaches down into the depths of my soul. And that’s what I wanted these poems to imbue; so, a sense of urgency and, in many ways, a sense of rescue.
I was looking to curate work that offers something to help me make meaning of the metaphor of my life. For the June curation, I’m very interested in poems doing the work of rescue and performing that service of trying to help me escape the predetermined metaphors of my life, of my mundane experience, and with the full force of these poets’ life force and their fragility to turn something, their mundane experience, into something transformative; and that’s what these poems are doing. Some of them are very loud and others are extremely quiet, but they all share a certain vibrancy and fervor for investigation.
Poets.org: Now, if you could direct our readers and listeners to one poem, or perhaps more than one poem, on Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would that be and why?
James: Oh, absolutely. I have had this opportunity to revisit the archives, which was a fun experience, and I happened upon TC Tolbert’s “This Is What You Are.” I find this poem extremely moving. We get to overhear the speaker kind of shepherding a previous self into the present moment. And it’s an intimate lyrical overhearing and a tender portrait of the speaker. And when I think of poems of identity, this poem possesses so much elasticity of the human spirit that I just find it remarkable. Its gesture of community and solidarity ring[s] out throughout the poem. There are two lines in the poem that really conjure its spirit. The phrase is, “[T]he purpose of a rope / is to borrow someone else’s strength.” And when I read that, I think, “Yes, that feels like a mission statement or an ars poetica for the poem,” and that’s the gift of poetry, so we should thank TC for that.
Poets.org: And what are you reading right now?
James: Oh, I am reading a great many things. I have so many books spread out on my desk and inside my bed. Right now, I finally have the opportunity and the time to read Ananda Lima’s debut fiction novel Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil. And it’s really electric, and it holds so much power. I’m also interested in TV writing, and I love the show Frasier. Even the dated episodes are still so well-written; and right now, I’m reading the Frasier scripts, because I’m just interested in how everything breaks down, how you open a scene and how you close one.
And in terms of poetry, I’m reading a friend’s book. It’s Charleen McClure, who … her debut collection of poems is called d-sorientation. She is already an acclaimed film actress. She starred in the critically acclaimed film All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, and she brings that same level of soulfulness to her poetry, as she did to her role in the film. And … gosh, what else? Oh, and I’m also reading Antigone, but I feel like I’m always rereading Antigone. That’s one of my favorite tragedies. I’m reading the French version of it, the French translation, and I’ve had that text since, gosh, since high school. Since I was in the ninth grade, I’ve been rereading it and the pages are well-worn. So those are just some of the books in my lexicon right now.
Poets.org: That’s something that we have in common: having discovered Antigone in high school. For me, it was the tenth grade, not the ninth grade. I understand completely why you love Frasier so much. I also will watch that show ad nauseam. I think it‘s one of the smartest shows to come out of the nineties, along with The Golden Girls, which was also ahead of its time in some ways. But I am curious about why you revisit Antigone of all of the plays in the Oedipus series, right, because it’s usually Oedipus the King to which people frequently return, but you return to Antigone, and specifically that Jean Anouilh translation. Why is that?
James: Yes, I do. I love that translation. You know, I return to it because I’m so compelled by the agency Antigone holds, and the fact that she is so brave given all of her circumstances. And, you know, they all have, all the main characters of these tragedies, have a tragic flaw. And it’s the kind of missed connections, the pleas that could have been made on her behalf that aren’t, and the ones that are. And really, what I’m most shocked and moved by is that, while everything is happening around her, all the laws that have been made, she’s really standing in her own grave the whole time.
And that is what I feel that life is in a certain kind of way. We have the body as a vessel. The play is really like, it’s a metaphor for, I think, just the [corporeal] form for mortality, and we are standing in our own graves the whole time, and we begin life with such spark, with such hope, and it ends the same way. And I wish that Antigone would have been able to exit, to leave, but I understand why that never could be. And it was one of the first tragedies I read that really taught me about restraint; and that you can’t always see beyond your own flaws, so you have to just ride it out in a way. And it’s still well-written, and the characters are so passionate. And Creon is so wrong, but I still see it from his point of view, right?
Poets.org: Yes.
James: Yeah, so there’s a lot of nuance there. And the idea that you can know that someone is wrong, but they’re acting in accordance to what they really believe. That’s compelling.
Poets.org: Indeed, indeed. Thank you for that. I’ve never heard that analysis of Antigone. I appreciate that.
James: I mean, it’s just my opinion, but I love that play.
Poets.org: Yeah. What are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?
James: A lot of things. You know, it’s hard when you’re working on many projects to just focus on one, especially when the themes overlap, but I kind of am really enjoying that. I try not to work on poems or prose that are too heavy, so then, I’ll come up with a really fun project. And so, right now, I’m working on a memoir. For the first time, I’m really writing prose work, and that has been very scary for me. So I’m balancing out that project with a little chapbook based on the movie Moonstruck, [laughs] starring Nicolas Cage and Cher. That has been really fun. It’s like this silly, lighthearted project, but also, of course, there’s a lot of gravitas there. And if you’ve seen that movie, it’s so kind of far out and wacky. I love the wacky. I’m leaning into the strange and unusual. It’s kind of like Beetlejuice. [laughs] I view Moonstruck as kind of like Beetlejuice, but for lovers.
Anyway, I’m also working on a children’s book, and that has been really healing. I’m working on the kind of book that I would have wanted as a kid, as a lonely kid who didn’t really fit in but loved people and couldn’t necessarily access all of my agency. So that has been really healing to do. And yeah, I’m also working, of course, on my second collection, and I’m loving it.
Poets.org: Moonstruck is a wacky film, but at the same time very rooted. It’s very much a New York film, and you can tell they actually filmed it in New York and not on one of those Warner Brothers back lots.
James: [laughs] Exactly. It has so much character. The characters are fantastic.
Poets.org: Yes. I want to talk a little bit about your work as a community worker, because you are a community worker in addition to being a poet. Can you talk a little bit about how your work as an art therapist and a social worker, especially a social worker in the field of harm reduction? How has this work influenced your poetry and vice versa?
James: Oh, immensely. Immensely, because I view poetry as a form of harm reduction. When I worked in this agency in the South Bronx, I worked in the women’s unit and I worked with women who were at a point in their life where they knew that they wanted to make some changes. And so, they were looking really for inspiration. And that was my job. It was never my job to judge them. It was always my job to assess where they were, show them what they were doing that was helping them, and be of service to them and give them options and resources.
And I love doing that. That is the job of just being in community and being in relation to and in family, the service of, you know, offering your perspective and showing people that they have options. And I really feel strongly about poetry, that poetry in my life has served to show me that I have options of thinking differently and viewing my life differently. And the resources are the lives and the experiences and the rhythm and the prosody of these poems that have been my friends. And I really feel that I’m in community, not just with the poets themselves, but with their work, with these poems. I have taken these poems on the train with me. I have poems that I reach to when I am looking for consolation. I have poems that I reach to when I don’t want to necessarily reach for something else.
Poems when I’m angry, poems when I’m joyous, and that is harm reduction. That is such a generous offering. And I look for poems that offer that generosity, but also tell me the truth. That was also my job when I was working in harm reduction, to tell people the truth and not to try to persuade them or convince them. And a good poem doesn’t try to convince you; it shows you the truth, and then you get to decide. And that is a sacred bond between the poet and the reader. That’s what I think and have always believed.
And I went to a conference once, I think it was—yes, it was Bread Loaf, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and I’ll never forget something that Jericho Brown told us in a lecture. He said, If I am writing a poem and someone can read my poem, and then, go commit a crime or enact some form of harm or violence onto someone else, then I don’t feel good about the poetry that I’m writing. I’m paraphrasing, but what Jericho was saying is that he wanted his poems to shift the perspective of the person who’s interacting with it. You know, it’s a relationship, and that’s how I feel about the poems that I write. I’m attempting something here. It’s not an act of vanity; it’s an act of service. I just love poems forever because they are really sacred places where I get to sit down, and when I’m a reader, I get to sit down and reevaluate everything and reimagine my life, and that is one of the closest ways of me communing with nature and with God.
Poets.org: Well, thank you, Omotara, for this generous and rich interview. It’s been a pleasure.
James: Thank you so much for having me. The pleasure was all mine.