Anger? Or the Creation of New Worlds?
Kicking off Season 2, Will thinks with the extraordinary poet, performer, and sound artist Jonah Mixon-Webster. Beginning with a recent comment made about the expression of anger in Mixon-Webster’s highly awarded Stereo(TYPE), the conversation catches the wind and explores a wide range of territory, from the politics of blackness to the creation of new worlds through fiction to the fabrication of the NFT.
Jonah Mixon-Webster is a poet-educator, scholar, and conceptual/sound artist from Flint, MI.
His debut poetry collection, Stereo(TYPE), won the PEN America/Joyce Osterweil Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is an alumnus of Eastern Michigan University and Illinois State University. He is the recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Images & Voices of Hope, The Conversation Literary Festival, and the PEN Writing for Justice Program. His poetry and hybrid works are featured in various publications including Obsidian, Harper’s, The Yale Review, The Rumpus, Callaloo, Pennsound, Best New Poets, and Best American Experimental Writing.
The title of this episode draws inspiration from Nina Simone’s song, “Mississippi, Goddamn!”, the fire of which fuels Priya and Will as they think about intersections of grief, race, gender, oppression, and joy.