Produced by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Source is a poetry podcast miniseries hosted by Divya Victor and Ashna Ali featuring conversations with five poets who discuss one of their poems and the story—and source—of its creation. 

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Ashna Ali (AA): Hello, I’m Ashna Ali. 

Divya Victor (DV): And I’m Divya Victor. 

AA: And you are listening to The Source, a poetry podcast produced by Asian American Writers’ Workshop. And we are your hosts.

DV: Ashna is a queer disabled poet and a child of the Bangladeshi diaspora. Their debut collection, The Relativity of Living Well, came out in September 2024 from Bone Bouquet.

AA: Divya is a poet, essayist, editor, and educator, and a daughter of the Tamil diaspora. She is the author of several books including Kith and Curb. She is also the director of the creative writing program at Michigan State University. 

The Source came to be because Divya randomly saw one of the four tweets I’ve ever tweeted in my life. In that tweet, I asked why no one had created a show or series where close readings of poetry could be showcased in the way that music often is. She DMed me and asked if I would do it if given the chance. And then she gave me that chance. 

DV: This was during the pandemic lockdown, which resulted in loneliness and separation from sites of our creative practice, and simultaneously there was a feral, exuberant outburst in creative collaboration. Ashna and I had never met each other, but we decided to make something together. We were motivated by the grand questions. Why not here? Why not now? And if not us, then who?

AA: Together as poets and avid listeners of poetry podcasts, we notice an absence of programs that depart from formalist analyses, and that access the human experience of poetry making: the labor, the love, the stories at the foundation of composition, and the narratives that are revealed through publication.

We invited five contemporary BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ poets: Zaina Alsous, Rajiv Mohabir, Hala Alyan, Douglas Kearney, and Josè Olivarez. We spoke with them about their creative process, and they told us about the making of their most treasured poems, their motivations for writing them, and explained choices about craft and kinship with the audiences that they hoped to reach.

DV: As scholars, editors, and poets, we know to rely on literary analyses and paratexts to understand poetry, but this time we want it to get back to the very makers, the very sources of creative work—hence the name, The Source. We tell the story of the poem from root, to seed, to bloom. 

AA: Welcome! We invite you to join us on The Source.

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AA: Folks, we are so excited to have José Olivarez in the house. He is the son of Mexican immigrants and the author of two collections of poems—most recently Promesas de Oro, or Promises of Gold, which was long-listed for the 2023 National Book Awards, and Citizen Illegal, which was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize.

Along with Felicia Rose Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. And he published the hybrid book Por Siempre in 2023 with Antonio Salazar. 

In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association, and in 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. 

He also, influentially, was one of the hosts of the very beloved poetry podcast The Poetry Gods, together with Jon Sands and Aziza Barnes, where he brought his tremendous warmth and brilliance to living rooms everywhere, and made listeners like me feel that poetry was the stuff of deep friendships and magic. We are so honored and delighted to have him with us today.

José Olivarez (JO): Thank you so much for that introduction. I’m excited to be here.

DV: We’re so excited to have you here, José. Today we’re gathering around your poem, “American Tragedy.” Poetry is, among other things, the art of connections. The poems which become most treasured to us show how seemingly disparate remote forces are connected to everyday actions and choices. Poems might, you could say, offer us daisy chains. On a summer day, you might lazily string a few daisies together by their stems to make a chain—a circle of flowers made from plucking a living thing from its earth—making a pleasing shape that you might wear for a moment then discard.

In electrical engineering, a daisy chain is a wiring sequence in which power flows without rupture. It’s a safe circuit for maintaining the circulation of power.

In José Olivarez’s “American Tragedy,” we experience the daisy chain in the poem’s theme, which is about how power moves and self-sustains, and through its syntax and form. One clause connects to another clause; one scene connects to another; another poet acquiesces to another powerful institution’s implicit demands; one dollar brings in another—on and on until a sequence of events are in a circuit, so inextricable, so utterly enmeshed that a circle begins to resemble a labyrinth, a trap, a tragic abyss. And who is trapped, and who are the trappers?

José’s poem contemplates how artists and writers are asked to trade in representation in order to participate and survive the economics of the markets for art and literature. This is a scathing, driven sequence with no apparent punctuation, and the poem’s anti-capitalist and abolitionist axle churns this escalating connection between economic conditions and the artist/writer’s materials.

He spins us into a kind of a vortex into which we are asked to gaze, and in that dizzying vortex we see how we might lose our ability to provoke effective social change, and where we absolutely, absolutely need to hold strong and vigilant to the critique of state power and the institutions that uphold it.

The poem’s title, “American Tragedy,” provokes a series of references for me, and most prominently, the novel of the same title by Theodore Dreiser, published a century prior to José’s poem. The novel, like this poem, imagines how ambition and the effort towards social ascension can lead to violent, horrific ends that we don’t quite anticipate.

And now, I invite José to introduce this poem, and to then read it for us.

JO: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for that. “American Tragedy”—I guess I want to introduce it in two ways: One, is that in the translator’s note of Promesas de Oro, my translator, David Ruano, notes that the poem is shortsighted in using the word “American” as shorthand for a “United States citizen.” As he notes, “the Americas” encapsulates more than the United States of America, but is a reference to all of North America, Central America, and South America. And while that might sound like small note, it is quite large, particularly to people that live in other parts of the Western Hemisphere. In South America, people that are being excluded from the United States project—whether it be self-actualization, democracy—who are being forcefully cut out, one of the rhetoric is, Donald Trump’s campaign was “Make America Great Again.” But which America? So I want to bring that into the space.

And then, the second thing that I’ll say is that the poem was inspired by the artworks of Julie Mehretu, who had a show at the Whitney that I went to go see with a friend. What struck me about the paintings is that they are quite large in scale, almost overwhelming to experience. And the captions or the titles of the paintings would give you information that was maybe not readily visible. They’re very abstract paintings, but they would say that the base image for one of these paintings was, for example, a photo taken at a migrant camp on the Mexico–United States border. And so even though it wasn’t visible, once you read that, it kind of textures your experience of the image. So I was trying to think about what it would look like, as opposed to trying to present, evermore clearly, right, thinking about an image that could clearly capture the suffering very close to my heart, how to obfuscate it in some way.

Because we’ve seen images that clearly show the violence that is happening at the southern border of the United States and elsewhere around the world, and no matter how high-definition, how close the artist brings you to those images, they don’t ever seem to make the violence stop—they don’t actually convince anyone that the violence is worth ending, right? And so as opposed to trying to make the image clearer, to in language try and obfuscate, use it as a base layer from which you can build up a debris, an overwhelming sense, that makes you feel something.

So that was the plan for the poem. I think, ultimately, the poem kind of spins its own way and does something a little bit different. I think mine is not nearly as abstract as the artwork of Julie Mehretu. But, I think starting in that place kind of informs some of the syntax, informs the shape of the poem, which has, as you pointed out, has no punctuation and is a solid block. I wanted it to feel kind of overwhelming. So with that, I’ll read the poem.

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American Tragedy

given your circumstances you become mouthless there-
fore voiceless therefore your movements require translation
given steel and made art objects given art objects the audience 
made noise the noise was harmless to the state therefore the 
state reciprocated with grants it did not matter that my art
objects were prison bars bent into letters to spell the word 
abolition it did not matter that my art objects said fuck 
ronald reagan said all presidents suck the state cannot dis-
tinguish between art objects barbed wire and roses are equal 
to the state the state loves art objects until the art objects are 
demolition crews outside police headquarters given dem-
olition crews in front of police headquarters the state will 
murder artist artists don’t destroy police therefore the state 
feeds artists the state allows artists to sit on its lap given 
the constraints of capitalism given rent due every month, 
given family members in need given insulin prices the art-
ists will accept the lap of the state therefore those proclaim-
ing to speak for the voiceless are being translated by the 
state therefore a microphone is the state’s constant art object
like a kaleidoscope it refracts the speaker’s voice into the 
same patriotic nonsense some artists don’t know they are 
being used by the state this makes them better compensated
representation doesn’t matter for the children being held by 
the state whatever they say isn’t fit for art given applause
isn’t an option given the exhibit is permanent given its ugl-
iness it’s steel its pickled breath unfit for postcard therefore,
it is easier to listen to an artist outside detention capable of 
spinning the secret into a coin we can share at a dinner party 
where everyone will sign and look contemplatively that’s their 
part in this American tragedy

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DV: I’m going to need a minute.

AA: That was so powerful. 

DV: Yeah.

José, I really appreciated what you were saying about scale and expansiveness of a certain abstraction, in contrast to high-definition close-ups. And, yet this poem, right, certainly brings us as close as we possibly can to two artists or poets exchanging a coin at that dinner table.

So this working with scale, moving outward, zooming out, and coming really, really close is so important. Could you bring us closer, zoom in, to the scene of composition? How did this poem begin? What was that scene of writing like for you? What was the weather, what was happening around you at that moment?

JO: That’s a good question. The way I write is kind of in bursts, so I’m not someone that writes every day. But for a month or two, when I really am composing, it becomes a daily practice, and so I’m sure that the show—in my mind, I could be wrong—but I’m sure that the show was in the winter, I believe February, at the Whitney, probably 2021.

And I just remember, again, being so moved by the project, which felt at odds, maybe, with the way that I was taught to write poetry, which is always about trying to get closer, right? Using language to really try to get to the most precise meaning of something.

And I also was struck by a potential solution to an issue that I found in my own poetics, right, which is that, as someone who’s Mexican American, some audiences—and I’m not upset or have beef with anyone that reads my poetry, I’m very grateful to everyone who finds my poems—but some, there are some people that find my poems, and for them, it allows them to see into an experience other than their own. And I guess I’d been thinking about how I didn’t necessarily want to be a translator, in that way. Right? I didn’t want to… Yeah, I think that’s the word for it: I didn’t want to be a translator.

And so for Mehretu to make these big compositions that refuse to show you the image that no one wants to see violence enacted on that scale, but maybe there’s a small part of us that really does want to see it, wants to glimpse the horrors of the world. And I think there is, and I think it’s because we’re removed from it.

It is horrifying, and also, there’s something maybe in audiences removed from violence that also reminds you how safe you are, how distant you actually are. The closer you get to it, it actually puts more distance between you, rather than what we imagine empathy to be, which puts you in someone’s shoes. I actually don’t believe in the project of empathy.

And so, that was kind of what was in my mind as I was trying to write this poem: I’ve written poems that try to bring you as close to the disaster as I can. And what I get is like, you can say, “Fuck Ronald Reagan” and you get polite applause. You get people that shake your hand and tell you how articulate you are. And that’s not the response that a poet like me is after when I write those words. The response that I want is the assault of politicians. For myself and maybe for a reader to take that action upon themselves, not to just kind of politely clap and move on.

AA: I was thinking about this as you were reading the poem, and even more so as you were speaking about the distance between the viewer and the reader and a represented violence or a discussed violence within the context of creating art and creating political art in this moment when we are watching genocide unfold from our phones. And writing poetry about it, and writing poetry as a political act of solidarity, writing poetry as an expression of rage.

But then, the work that we make becomes an art object that functions and circulates in the way that you critique in the poem. And the poem is discussing an art object and is the art object and you’re the artist, but Julie Mehertu is the artist, and the painting and the poem are having this conversation, and you’re sharing and swapping roles with its artist. Can you speak more to the doubling or the mirroring or the dynamic that you’re sharing with this painting and its artist as you negotiate what it means to be the producer of political art forms?

JO: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is… the phrase that comes up is, it’s fucked.

It is both something that we must do, right, create these artifacts, and yet the way that violence works is: if we do not succeed, all of these artifacts become a part of some museum that then memorializes a tragedy that we were trying to stop in the moment. And after those museums, those artifacts are visited, and recited, and affirmed for their potential to heal, for their potential to teach us something about humanity, about ourselves. And in the moment, they are used entirely differently, which is—I mean, there’s many ways that they’re used in the moment. I think there absolutely is solidarity, and there is an insistence on life, an insistence that there are alternatives, an insistence that genocide is not the only possibility in this moment, a refusal to accept that as matter of fact, right?

But I think there’s other ways that those artifacts are used and one of those ways is to… what would I say? Maybe as like, pre-museum, as like a pre-memorialization. And I guess where, for me, the conflict is or what the reminder is, is that we say in poetry that all poetry is political, right? That the personal is political, and it is a reminder that… that may be true in certain circumstances and might have some truth to it, but at the end, for me, the political is political and we must be clear about what we envision and what we want in the world.

DV: This poem appears on the page as a block of prose—it has no capital letters, no explicit punctuation—and it also has this language structure that makes it resemble a logic problem, right? “If, given this, then that,” or “if then that, therefore.” Could you talk to us about how these choices get made, how you make these choices? And what is that relationship between form and structure and some of these elements of typography and punctuation? What is the relationship of all of these to the emotional content of the poem for you? Or the emotional motivation of that poem and the kind of political content that it can manifest or make possible?

JO: I’ll begin with the last part which is about the choice to not include punctuation. For me, that is about making a poem that is unrelenting, that has no breaths in it, has no space in it, but feels all-encompassing. I like this idea of it as using logic, equations, or that sort of formula. It doesn’t let you out until you reach the conclusion. And I wanted it to feel overwhelming, because thematically what the poem was kind of driving me towards is something that feels overwhelming, that feels unrelenting, that feels maddening. So for me that was why that choice was made.

In terms of some of the other choices—using the prose block, choosing the specific language of “if this, then that”—again, my intent started with writing something that felt very abstract, that on some level, the reader would feel connected back to some core, and I think part of it is my own… my own shortcomings as an artist that, for better or for worse, I can’t help but be a little more literal than I even want to be. And so the poem, which I intended to be very abstract, is actually quite figurative. But I think the abstraction lives on in the form and the structure, and carries some of the original intent of the poem, which was to kind of do a sort of mimesis, I hope I’m pronouncing that word correctly, of these paintings that I love.

DV: Yeah, it’s fascinating because these logic problems are supposed to create a kind of spaciousness in the chaos of thought, right? They’re supposed to arrange things in ways where eventually something starts to make sense if we place them in the right order. And yet, you’re kind of using it in this resistant way, or this oppositional way, perhaps, to say that the logic is a trap, it is creating this labyrinth from which we are not able to escape.

And that engagement with like the scientific structure, or even a mathematical structure, for me, reminds me of how you use certain tropes and forms of an educational scenario, something my students really appreciate in some of your other poems. You engage with these disciplinary institutions. Is that something that comes through consciously for you, or do you find yourself using certain established forms in an oppositional way just by instinct?

JO: Well, I’ll speak about the form that I feel most comfortable with, and for me, that’s the sonnet. And what I love about the sonnet is, I guess for a large part of my training, I felt very opposed to writing in any form, because early on in my education it felt as though forms were… it didn’t feel like people that were writing in form were considering me as a potential audience member. And it felt this way just because I remember reading books, loving books, and then loving poetry and not finding many books in the library that felt like they particularly cared about a Mexican American from a working-class background in the Midwest, when they made references to Robert Frost, New England winters, or whatever.

And so, early on I resisted writing about nature for those very same reasons. It felt like that was a world of poetry that excluded me, and as a result, I wanted to kind of turn my back on those worlds as well. And then the sonnet makes a lot of sense to me. The volta, for me, is an important part of all of my poems, regardless of what form I’m writing in. And so the more I kind of wrote and made poems and made images, the more of an affinity I felt towards the sonnet, and it’s kind of… and it’s volta in particular, and so I just started really writing into them and enjoying them.

And also there was a little bit of opposition or a little bit of like—perhaps some of the old masters might be rolling in their graves. And the idea of that fills me with joy. Like forget those people, I get to do this too. And I get to participate in all of these forms, and I’m not going to give up writing about nature, because I grew up in the city in the twentieth century, twenty-first century. I’m going to write into nature in my own particular way and bring my own particular flourishes. So absolutely, I think there is that kind of oppositional kind of stance to some of those choices.

AA: One of the things that I love the most about your poetry is the tremendous surprise that emerges so often as you switch registers and code switch and bring in the canonical greats and pop culture and multiple languages and really the texture of our daily lives.

And you very explicitly frame yourself as a child of Mexican immigrants and a Mexican poet who is really thinking about being left outside of the world of poetry, making your way into the world of poetry, creating accessible voices in the world of poetry that might have welcomed you at a time when you felt you were not welcome. That’s a very specific positionality to be negotiating. And one of the things that we’re curious about, in our conversations on this podcast, is sort of like the life cycle of a poem, or of a work. 

And I’m wondering, you’ve told us about this encounter you had with these paintings and what you were thinking about. But now the poem is out in Promesas de Oro, which has done really well, and I’ve seen you read from it in a variety of different places, and it’s really beautifully received. But audiences and reception are sort of what’s on the table at the moment. What has been the reception and how, how does the way your work is encountered as you come to it and through it in this oppositional way, made you feel?

JO: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, in some ways, there’s always a little bit of disappointment, because one of the conversations that I’ve been trying to kind of open up with my writing both in Citizen Illegal and Promesas de Oro, is about class, right? I’m very conscious of my positionality. But for me, it’s important not just that I’m the child of Mexican immigrants, but to note that my parents were undocumented and grew up working-class, that there’s something valuable to me about going to school in public institutions, receiving supplemental support growing up, from the Catholic Church fundraisers and, on occasion, food stamps. Those sort of experiences, writing from that particular position, feels important to me because it just feels like one of the kind of silences in the world of all literature is that a lot of writers—not that they’re making a ton of money from writing—are able to practice the craft because of some generational wealth.

One of the threads that I tried to make really loud in Promesas de Oro, that I thought I had made loud in Citizen Illegal, was about class. But I think it’s very hard, maybe, to have conversations about money, to have conversations about class. And so often, the conversations that people will have with me are about racial and ethnic identity. And I think those conversations are important, too, I just think that they can’t necessarily be uncoupled from a more thorough understanding of where exactly I’m writing from. And where I’m writing from is not just Mexican American, but it’s a very specific kind of Mexican American experience.

DV: This helps me connect something you said earlier, José. You mentioned not wanting to be a translator in that way, to be at the receiving end of a compliment like, “Oh, you’re so articulate,” which is really a microaggression. What are some of the responsibilities or expectations that you feel are placed on you as a poet at this particular moment in your career, who’s being received in certain ways that you enjoy in certain ways, that you’re trying to push back against? But especially as a poet working in the traditions of working-class and class-aware poetry, what are some of those pressures?

And I think our listeners would especially be curious to hear if you’re finding spaces and poets around whom you don’t need to feel that pressure, where you can be yourself without being at the receiving end of that pressure.

JO: Yeah, absolutely. This kind of comes back to the poem, right? One of the twin blades of where I’m at in this point of my career is that my work has been more popular than I ever imagined. And, as a result of that, I get invited into rooms and spaces—you know, same thing—that I never imagined I’d be invited to.

And because of where I come from, and because of what my own political stances are, it does make me wonder about… it does make me question my own work. It does make me wonder if I’m being as subversive as I mean to be, if I’m pushing the right buttons.

Because if I’m being totally honest, if my work was what I imagined it to be, what I mean for it to be, then there’s no reason for the White House to invite me to anything, ever. And I’ve been invited to the White House. And, yeah so, absolutely. It makes me wonder about that. 

Now, in reality, I think my work is not exactly what I mean for it to be—but I think I do a good job, I am proud of my work. And I think part of it is probably that the quote-unquote ruling class, Joe Biden, has some bad advisors, you know what I mean? He needs to be more picky in who he invites. [Laughs]

One of the great kind of truths that drives me crazy is, you meet people that work for institutions that are terrible, that inflict various violences… but the people that work for those institutions are all kind, they’re all such great people. And so, how is it that all of these nice people work for and uphold these terrible institutions?

So that’s one answer. Another answer is, there are multiple pressures that I feel. One is to write poems that might be useful to young Latinx immigrants, children of immigrants, maybe people of the diaspora more generally. I know that some of the books that have meant the most to me are not necessarily written by Latinx authors, but reflect the type of migration—whether it’s refugee poetics or, a type of forced migration poetics—that give me a better, clearer understanding of my own journey. I want to write words that are useful to other people in those situations, that might help someone in those same places. And at the same time, there’s, like I said, this kind of sense of wanting to get even more abstract and to see how far I can kind of push the envelope and maybe get myself kicked out of more fancy places. So those are some of the things, some of the pressures that I feel at this point.

AA: José, I want to ask you the other side of that question. We talked about some really unhomely places where the radical potential of poetry is maybe watered down because of the institutional context, or challenged in some ways, circulating in ways that maybe were not your dream for its future when you were writing them, right?

What’s the opposite of that? What are the spaces that feel lush, that feel rich, that feel radical, that feel like the poem is doing the work that you wanted to do? What poets are you writing with who are doing that work? If you were to identify yourself in a contemporary tradition of working-class poets who are doing that work, who are those people, what rooms are they in? Like, when do you walk into a room and do your thing and who are you reading with who are making you feel alive?

JO: That’s such a beautiful question. There’s a few different answers. One is, the spaces in poetry in the United States that make me feel the most electric are local things… I’m thinking about, in 2020, I visited San Antonio and there was a punk rock/poetry open mic/zine release party put on by poets of the Rio Grande Valley. And a lot of those poets were new to me, but I was so impressed by the work that they were doing, all of them, it felt like they were… It was a different type of language that they were using, than the language of poetry more nationally, and that kind of regional identity feels so important to me.

What’s another space? Oh, I visited El Paso a year ago and same thing—the community of writers there. So everywhere when I get to travel, when I get to kind of be in conversation with a local community of poets that are building work for one another and in conversation with one another. To me, those kinds of local spots feel so vibrant and alive and feel like what I want to read the most.

In terms of which of my contemporaries I want to read with all the time and feel most hype with when I read with them, the people that come to mind are Nate Marshall and Fati [Fatimah] Asghar and Safia Elhillo, Jon Sands, Eve Ewing. Those are some of the first people that come to mind.

And then I also want to add in a couple of my students, people like Vic Chavez Peralta. These are writers that I never tire of hearing and whose kind of voices and affirmations I’m writing towards when I sit down to write my own poems.

AA: That’s a beautiful answer. Thank you so much, José.

DV: The local things, the regional particulars—I’m thinking here too about what [Gloria] Anzaldúa has said about carrying one’s home on one’s own back, and if there’s a way we also carry the local on our backs. That there is a mobile quality to what is local, what is experienced as local.

When we named The Source, José, we were thinking a lot about what kinds of fertilities, what kinds of soils and locations we are writing from, that kind of local space from which our ideas are germinating. So please answer this question however you please: At this very moment, what is in your local soil?

JO: That’s such a great question. So one of the things that has always been true for me is that I’ve always felt more comfortable and confident writing about the past, and in particular, writing about where I’m from. And I think that’s one of the qualities of my work that I really love. And at the same time, one of the ways that I’m pushing myself to grow as an artist and as a poet in particular, is to try and write more presently. And so I’m really thinking—like now that I’m living in Jersey City, and as my class positionality changes, how do I write about this particular experience, but maintain some of the… I like to call them flourishes, some of the kind of energy that I can give my poems when I’m writing about Calumet City, [Illinois]. 

And so I guess in my local garden right now is what is happening in Jersey City, right, which is like the farmers market a couple blocks away, and also jogging around the riverfront. And what does it mean to be someone who jogs when I come from a place where the only time we ran was when we were running from something.

So these are some of the things in my local garden. Also one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this poem, is because I’m still thinking about those paintings. I’m still thinking about that question about, how do we bring in, as a base, this kind of energy and understanding of what is real? But how do we wear it in such a way that doesn’t give everyone access to see the kind of… and it doesn’t even necessarily have to be a horror right? But I’m also thinking about everything from cultural experiences to personal relationships.

One of the things that I didn’t really think about or know about myself until I wrote and published Promesas de Oro, is how much I write about and to my friends and family—and since I don’t use stage names, how do I write about some of those relationships, but maybe build in a layer of privacy? I don’t know, how to keep it intimate but distant in some ways, maybe those are some of the questions that are germinating my soil right now.

AA: I love that so much. José, this has been so lovely. Thank you so much for giving us your time and exploring these matters of scale and audience and the politics of our poetics with us this afternoon. You’ve been amazing.

JO: Thank you so much, Ashna and Divya. Thank you so much to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Thank you for giving me space to talk about some of these things. I don’t think that I’ve ever really had a chance in interviews to say some of these things that I’ve been carrying on my heart for a while, so… maybe I’ll start getting kicked out of more invitations now, we’ll see.

AA: Thank you for not running away from us!

This interview, which took place on May 24, 2024, has been edited for length and clarity.

”American Tragedy“ from PROMISES OF GOLD by José Olivarez, translated by David Ruano González. Translation copyright © 2023 by David Ruano González. Used by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All Rights Reserved.