In 2026, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Danusha Laméris 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 March, Danusha Laméris. Danusha is the author, most recently, of Blade by Blade. Danusha, welcome and thank you for joining me today.
Laméris: Thank you so much for having me, Mary.
Poets.org: Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for March?
Laméris: Well, I turned to the poets I have been inspired by, especially in the past year. And what inspires me tends to be poems that really make me feel. I want to feel something. I want to be moved. I want to see life from different perspectives. From up above, from down on the ground, I just want to feel that shift in viewpoint that allows me to see the world in a new way. And so the poets I reached out to, some of them were poets I’ve known or read for a long time. Some were fairly new to me, but I’d come across their work in journals over the past year. Thank God for small presses and journals who’ve been holding up and sharing these poets with us. And I reached out to people really based on that: Had I been touched or moved by their work?
And I love that variety of poets that I’ve known a long time and poets that are new to me or newer. And so that was really how I went about that. And I think for me, the way that poetry entered my life was through my grandfather in Barbados. And I always remember walking down Dover Beach with him in Barbados with his friends that I didn’t realize as a child were writers and poets and thinkers that I would read later on. But they were walking down the beach reciting poems aloud to each other over the sound of the waves in that gorgeous Caribbean lilt. And I just thought, what is this? And I was so struck and altered by the sound of their voices reciting these rhythmic words. And ever since then, I feel like I’ve been trying to get back to that, either in my own poems or the poems that I read or share, a sense of being transported, even for a moment, and that sense of magic. So I know that’s not exactly a rubric [laughs], but that’s what I would say about that. [laughs]
Poets.org: Wonderful. Now, if you could direct readers to one poem or more than one poem in our collection at Poets.org that you have not curated, what would it be and why?
Laméris: For me, one of the poems that I want to say haunts me is the poet, Nickole Brown’s poem, “Prayer to Be Still and Know.” I read that poem to myself. I read it aloud. I read it to other people. And it’s one of the few poems that can make me almost cry. Like it brings me to the verge of tears often reading that poem. And I think it’s because there’s such a yearning in it and specifically a yearning to be closer to the natural world and to feel a part of the fabric of everything. And I feel that same yearning, and I feel that the poet Nickole Brown expresses it so eloquently and in such a raw and beautiful way that I come back to that again and again, and it’s kind of a pivotal poem for me in that way. And maybe we have those and they change by the decade, depending on where we are in our lives and what we’re wanting. And as somebody who really wants to feel close to nature and who spent a lot of her childhood barefoot and unsupervised and running through the redwoods, riding horses bareback, and picking blackberries, and stomping on blackberries, and running through mud puddles to get to the creek and catch tadpoles [laughs]. I was just a messy and earth, I want to say earth-bound kid. And so I think there’s something in Nickole’s poem that makes me remember that kid in me that, I don’t want to say this, but that ate snails out of the garden [laughs] and did all these crazy things, but that just felt a part of the world. And that poem is a prayer to be let back in.
Poets.org: Not so crazy. When I was little, I used to eat leaves. My cousin and I, we would pretend we were making some kind of nature salad and would pick leaves from trees and put them in her wagon and make this dirty salad and eat it [laughs].
Laméris: That makes me feel so much better [laughs]. I love it. And I can just see this—
Poets.org: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think, for me anyway, one of the benefits of getting older, because I am in middle age now, is that I feel like I’m getting closer to that little girl again. And I wish that for a lot of women, because I think something happens to us in our teenage years where we begin to try to conform more so to other people’s expectations, and we become disconnected from nature, from ourselves. But I think when we get older, we start to ... It comes full circle.
Laméris: That is such a hopeful thing you’re saying. And I think I feel that way too, although I hadn’t articulated it to myself. You’re doing that so beautifully. But yeah, there’s a way in which with time we can cycle back. And there is also a way in which part of the role of poetry can be to lead us back there and to remind us of that self that we lost. There are so many selves we’ve lost along the way, but for most adults, and there’s a way in which poems can call us back, even for an hour, right? Back to that scene.
Poets.org: Yeah, or minutes.
Laméris: Even for minutes.
Poets.org: Even for minutes.
Laméris: And then maybe that time gets longer and longer [laughs].
Poets.org: Yeah. Whose work are you reading now?
Laméris: Well, I brought my book stack because it’s usually one of those questions that when people ask me, I just sort of freeze and go “Uh, a lot of things.” [laughs] So to avoid that, I have put my bookstack on my desk and I am beginning to read The Natural Order of Things by Donika Kelly. Loving the voice in this collection. I am also reading, this is a fun sparkly cover, but January Gill O’Neil’s Glitter Road is so fabulous. And also Tiana Clark’s Scorched Earth. I know, right? I mean, what a wealth of things I have on my desk! And then I love Vincent Antonio Rendoni’s A Grito Contest in the Afterlife. Amazing cover on this book too. So funny, so poignant, and sad. And of course, Ada Limon’s Startlement. I’ve moved up to Sonoma County where Ada is from, and I’m so aware of the locations where these poems take place. And then, Keetje Kuipers’s Lonely Women Make Good Lovers—fabulous title, fabulous book. So that’s my desk pile at the moment.
Poets.org: [laughs] Fantastic. Now, what are you working on now in your writing, teaching, or publishing life?
Laméris: Well, a number of things. And the first thing is that I read. It’s funny that everything sort of comes back to reading, and reading a lot has been so important to me, and I’ll say more about that in a moment. But in addition to that, writing new poems, slowly but surely, and seeing where those go. I don’t really have that way of writing that I’m say [sic], oh, I’m working on a collection and here’s a theme. That’s not how it looks for me. I just write and let that slow accumulation show me what it’s about over time. And so I’m in the midst of that. I could be halfway through a collection or more. I could be just starting one. I don’t really know until I hit a certain critical mass where I feel like, okay, I see what this is doing. So that’s in process.
And then I’m also leading an online community called Litfield that is for poets. And so that’s a place where we do writing prompts together and invite in some of my favorite poets for Q&A and readings. And so that’s just another thing that I’ve been enjoying doing, and that’s part of my landscape right now. But it always really comes back to making the time to read. When I was a younger poet, and before I had a book and all of that, I never went to grad school. I was a stay-at-home mom with a really special-needs kid, and his hospital time and medical care took a lot of attention and focus in that period of my life. And the one thing I did for myself in terms of a dedication was to keep reading. And I would take myself to a cafe maybe two or three days a week and just read for hours—two or three hours at a time, and such bliss to be able to do that.
And I know Mary Oliver once said, you can live on about as much as it takes to feed a chicken [laughs]. She’s quoted as saying that [laughs] when they asked how she had time to write. And I think I was living on what it took to feed a chicken back then. But that has always been, first and foremost, the primary dedication for me of a poetic life is still making that time to read, even if it’s just a half an hour, you know, or maybe it’s an hour, but setting aside time to arrive at the altar of poetry in some way. I hold this hope that poems open a way for us to be more compassionate, more present, more aware, that they let us step into other people’s shoes for a moment. And I just hope that my poems can do that for people. I hope that the poems I read are slowly having that effect on me. And so that’s always the primary work of it, I think, is attending to poetry.
Poets.org: Speaking of attending to poetry and also about your writing community, I have a lot of questions—
Laméris: Okay.
Poets.org: About Litfield. First, for how long have you been running Litfield, and how do you think it differs from other writing communities and retreats?
Laméris: Oh, that’s a great question. I’ve been running it since July of last year in terms of the community part of Litfield, having it as a community, and I’m loving doing it. The focus of it is poetry, and so I think that some are more general writing communities. This is very specifically poetry. And I think so much is about flavor [laughs] because a lot of it’s about how you hold the space. I really love to keep a very safe feeling space for everybody, and it’s important to me to bring in the poets whose work I really enjoy and am connected to and love. And so I think there are those factors. I think there’s a feeling of community there that has been really precious to me, and that’s something that’s hard to quantify. There’s just a feeling there that I think is really full hopefully of welcome and inspiration. And I know I’m writing a lot of my poems in there as well now, so.
Poets.org: So it’s a relatively new community.
Lamèris: It’s new.
Poets.org: Yeah. So maybe you haven’t made too many memories yet, but I’m still curious and I’m going to ask anyway, what do you think has been your most memorable or pivotal experience so far while running this community?
Laméris: Oh, okay. That’s a fun question. Well, that is probably having Dorianne Laux visit a couple of months ago, and she did an hour-long time with us of reading poems that I prompted her to read and then talking about different stages of her career, and [laughs] Dorianne’s a hoot. And at some point she said, “I don’t trust myself to write poems at all. I’m an idiot.” [laughs] She said, “But I trust my subconscious. I trust that other part of me to write the poem.” [laughs] So I said, “Well, maybe you’re an idiot savant.” And she said, “That’s right.” But what was so funny about it is that she really disconnected herself from the self that makes those big leaps and comes up with that perfect metaphor and writes these brilliant poems. And she’s like, “That’s not really me, the person or personality Dorianne, that’s something else.” She just said, “Get in the backseat and let the poem drive.” And I’ve been thinking about that ever since and what that means, especially because she was one of my first teachers when I was in my twenties, somebody I worked with just, I know I said I didn’t go to grad school, I didn’t, but worked with one-on-one. And I’m always learning from her. And that idea of just let go of the control of your own work and see what happens. That was pivotal.
Poets.org: Absolutely. Dorianne, as you know, and as some of our readers and listeners already know, will be our Guest Editor for April. She is also a Chancellor Emeritus [sic] at the Academy. And speaking of somebody, by the way, who is just completely herself or seems to be at all times [laughs].
Laméris: At all times. Let’s give her an award for that because it’s a quality that I love.
Poets.org: Yes.
Laméris: And that she definitely carries.
Poets.org: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Danusha, for this time.
Laméris: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.