In 2025, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Tacey M. Atsitty 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 November, Tacey M. Atsitty. Tacey is the author of (At) Wrist. I like saying that. [laughs] Tacey, welcome and thank you for joining me today.
Atsitty: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.
Poets.org: Fantastic. Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for November?
Atsitty: Yeah. So I envisioned a mental map of all the different places that I’ve lived, and places that I’ve traveled, and people and poets that I’ve encountered. And so, I revisited these locations in my mind, and places like the Four Corners Area where I grew up in New Mexico and Arizona and Utah. And we have poets in this curation from Alaska and from New York, my time living in New York and time living in Florida, and everywhere in between, even where I am now in the Midwest.
And so over time, of course, I developed a deep appreciation for all the poets themselves as people and also especially for their work. And I’m just really delighted to present a collection that not only showcases diversity and location, but as well as a mix of well-established poets. We have some poet laureates [sic] [from] different states that are going to be here in November’s curation, and also they’re alongside some emerging poets that I’m really excited about and excited to get their work out there. So, yeah. I’m also cognizant that November is Native American Heritage Month, and so I was certain to put some poets whose work that I really admire in the creation for this month.
Poets.org: Now if you could direct our readers and listeners to one poem, or even more than one poem, in our collection at Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?
Atsitty: Yeah. So this is a poem that I haven’t curated … and the poem came to mind. It struck me pretty strongly. I was in my first semester of my doctoral program at Florida State, and it was a Zoom class because it was in the pandemic—during the pandemic, the first few months of the pandemic. And one of the professors had us read aloud Joy Harjo’s poem, “Perhaps the World Ends Here.” And even though I was familiar with the poem, it just kind of really hit me differently; maybe because I thought the world was ending [laughs] in the pandemic in a way, but also because I had just relocated to Tallahassee for my program. And it was … we all know it was a very isolating time. And so just having that connection in that class to the poet, Joy Harjo, it really sort of gave me a feeling that I wasn’t isolated anymore. That I was somehow being seen through her poem because I could empathize with it, because I do know Joy in our circles, in our writing circles and I just felt like I wasn’t alone in that class or in that program or in that new experience, or even in the environment that we were in at that time during the pandemic. And so her work mattered enough for us to be reading it, but it made me think, well, okay, we all have ... Well, I don’t know about we all, but I have sometimes imposter syndrome. And so it’s like, “Am I good enough to be here?” And I would think I was definitely feeling that my first little bit of the program and reading Joy’s poem just really helped me feel like, “Yes, I am good enough to be here.” Right. Yeah. Her poem, her poetry, her work matters, and my work matters as well.
Poets.org: Absolutely. What are you reading right now?
Atsitty: Yeah. Because I feel bad. [laughs] Well, because I’m teaching and I know I’m a poet, but I’m teaching creative writing full-time at Beloit College. And so I’ve been reading a fair amount of prose right now. I’m teaching Introductory to Literary Studies and Introduction to Creative Writing, so a multigenre class and so in the freshman writing seminar as well.
So reading a lot of prose. But over the summer I really fell in love with Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. It’s a super thick novel, but I participated in a book festival, the Unbound Book Festival in Columbia, Missouri, last spring. And she was a keynote speaker there and just gave a really wonderful, heartfelt account of her coming to America and her experience growing up in South Korea, and then her journey here and her becoming a writer.
And she talked about the complexity of her character building and how she knows each and every single character, even though we might see them just a little bit, if we only see them for a moment in the book. And I also loved it because it, you know, just explored so many wonderful themes of identity and belonging; and discrimination between the Japanese and the Koreans and how to really.... It was just a really wonderful story overall. And I also loved her work so much. Well, that book in particular, it took me a little, I’m a slow reader, and it takes me a while, but even then I remember getting about, I think two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through the book, and I was like, “I don’t want this to end.” And so I would read fewer and fewer chapters, or I would only allow myself a little bit because I just didn’t want it to end. And that hasn’t happened to me in a very long time. So yeah, that was Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. But I also finished Jon Hickey’s book of fiction, it’s called Big Chief and Chris Fink’s short collection of short prose called Forage Like a Bear.
And I’m currently reading m.s. RedCherries’s novella, Mother. I’m also teaching that. And some things I have on deck is [sic] Kalehua Kim’s Mele and Reading Water by [Derek] JG Williams. And those two are poetry, so I’m excited to get to those.
Poets.org: I’m also kind of a slow reader. This is a safe space to talk about that, right? [laughs] I also tend to read rather slowly in my free time, and I also prefer to read prose when I’m not working, either prose or I’m reading a lot of criticism in the London Review of Books or The New York Review of Books. And it’s so interesting how you recount your experience of Pachinko because I felt exactly the same way reading the Neapolitan novels. I did not want that series to end. So I probably took my time reading it over the course of a year because I didn't want to let go of those characters. [laughs]
Atsitty: Wow. Yeah. I had to finish it sooner than a year, but yes. [laughs]
Poets.org: So what are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?
Atsitty: Yes. So I just relocated to the Midwest to Beloit, Wisconsin, from Florida. And it’s my first job right out of my doctoral program. So I’ve been learning a lot as a professor now teaching here. And so I haven’t been writing a lot, but I’ve recently dusted off my dissertation that I did finish when I was at Florida State. And one, you know, of the things that I was really kind of worried about was, so the book is in three sections right now, and one of the sections talks about ... Well, it’s a bestiary of Navajo monsters, and the bestiary is written in the emblem poetry form from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. And so … it’s this multimodal form. It has the title and an impresa and then it has an image and it has the poem. It’s a version or early version of the sonnet. And in the form itself, it has notes and texts on the side.
And so, I have been having a hard time trying to grapple with is [sic] this want to be its own chapbook, does it want to be its own work and stand alone, or is it supposed to be kind of sandwiched in with the dissertation as I’ve presented it? And so, as I’ve been looking at it just recently, these past few weeks, I think I see it shaping out to be part of a larger work. And larger work, meaning that, yes, I think that it will be sandwiched with these other parts of these other sections that I have created and put together. And so I’m also thinking about some prose that I’ve been writing recently, and I’m just really undecided right now. I feel like content wise it goes into this book, this manuscript that I’m putting together. But I know that it’s not too often that you see, you know, prose and poetry, short stories essentially. So I have a lot of prose poetry in this manuscript, my dissertation, and then formal poetry, there’s sonnets, of course, and some free verse, but then short stories.
So I’m kind of teeter tottering right now about, it’s a question, “Well, can I find a publisher that would publish something like that, with multimodality and multigenre?” And so, I don't know. We’ll see. But that’s essentially what I’m working on right now.
Poets.org: One of those emblem poems I believe is on Poets.org, and I feel like I’m going to butcher the title. [laughs] So can you please say it for us?
Atsitty: Sure. Yes. It is “Ajil: Jingle Girl.”
Poets.org: “Jingle Girl.” Thank you so much. A legend about a girl who transforms into a bear. Now the form, emblem poetry, as you noted earlier, arose particularly in the sixteenth century with the publication of Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum Liber, published in 1531. Can you tell us more about your discovery of that form and why you chose it as the gateway to share stories from Navajo mythology?
Atsitty: Sure. So I was taking an ecocriticism class from my professor, Molly Hand, and she had presented some bestiaries to us and I was really enthralled in the images and just kind of how the text written alongside the images. And we also came upon this book called Minerva Britanna by Henry Peacham. And it had the emblem poetry form. And so, it has a title up on top, and it has an image in a framed rectangular image. And then it has a sonnet … an older version of the sonnet than what we know now. And then it has some texts on the right side, some notes on the left, depending; and so I had been taught, of course, as a poet that poetry should stand alone and it doesn’t need images. And for a long time I did believe that, and for the most part [laughs], I don’t prefer images with my poetry. But with this particular form, the sonnets, I feel like the sonnets were strong enough on their own that the images wouldn’t detract from it. And I just really loved the composition of everything on the page.
And so, as I was thinking about my final project for this ecocriticism class, I was thinking about what kind of bestiary because I loved the bestiaries. If I were to create a bestiary, what would I create? And the Navajo and my tribe, we have these monsters in our creation story. And I was told these stories by my dad, you know, since I was a young girl.
I remember being out in Cove, Arizona, and looking in the land and a lot of mesas, red dirt, very dry, of course. And I remember imagining the monsters kind of rolling rocks around, killing people, and just thinking, and my imagination would kind of run wild and I loved reading the stories when I got older. And so I often thought about them as people, even though they were called “monsters.” And even though in society we’re taught to be afraid of monsters. I was thinking about their narratives. And, in particular, with my tribe, our people, we created the monsters. And it came a time during our creation stories when there was this big argument between first man and first woman, and the argument was so big that it separated the sexes. So all of the men left … and went across the river. They were the hunters and they were the ones who cultivated the fields. And so, after some time, the women were okay, they were fine. But after a year or so, then after the crops had run out, and they weren’t hunters, so they had begun to really suffer from hunger.
And it was during this time when the sexes, it’s called separation of the sexes, that the monsters came about from both sides, from decisions that they had made. I’ll keep it at that, for any of our young viewers or listeners, decisions that they had made. And then the women gave birth to the monsters. And so they were not full human. They were half human and then half something else. And so because of the shame that these women had, they abandoned their babies and the holy people, the Diyin Dine’é, they had compassion on these babies. And so they sent animals to take care of them and to rear them.
And so once they grew older, they had, I think, right—now these are my thoughts, thinking about their narrative and their lives and what their history is that, how would I feel if I were abandoned? How would I feel if I saw my mother caring for her other children, but yet she had left me? And those feelings of resentment and anger. And so, am I justified as a monster to go and express my anger in the ways that I do?
Anyway. So a large part of what I feel like that I doing with the bestiary of these Nayééʼ is taking responsibility for the monsters that we create in our own society. So often we say, “Oh, those are monsters. You’re a monster. He’s a monster…. Stay away.” But really, right, those monsters—we created them. We need to take accountability as a society, as people for the things that we create and reinstitute some sort of peace, or there’s a lot of talk of care right now in academia, but I would even say love.
That’s kind of what I feel like with my bestiary, but I also really embody my bestiary. You know, I feel like I’m also … there are moments when I become a monster. My poor husband [laughs], he sees my monster side when it comes out, as me, Navajo woman so anyway.
Poets.org: Well, thank you so much Tacey for this talk and for your insights— and this curation. Thank you.
Atsitty: Thank you.