 Good afternoon everybody. I'm Neil Romanosky. I'm the Dean of University Libraries, and it is my pleasure to welcome you all to this fall semester's Authors at Alden event. I've been informed actually that Authors at Alden is celebrating its 10th year this year. So very special thank you to many authors and guests and staff who have made this series such a success over the years. And of course to our Libraries Events Coordinator, Jen Harvey, for organizing this evening's event. So today we're hosting a conversation, really excited about this with poet Frank X and Lorraine Walknut, who's a library subject library for film theater, English and African-American studies. Together they'll be discussing Professor X's most recent collection of poems, masked man, black pandemic and protest poems. So Frank X is a professor of African-American and Africana Studies and English, as well as the director of the English MFA program at the University of Kentucky. To date, he has written 11 collections of poetry that have earned him multiple awards, such as the Lillian Smith Book Award in 2004, the Land and Literary Fellowship for Poetry in 2005, and NAACP Image Award in 2014, and the Judy Gaines Young Book Award in 2020, among others. He has served on the boards for the Kentucky Humanities Council, Apple Shop and the Kentucky Writers Coalition, as well as serving as vice president of the Kentucky Center for the Arts and the executive director of Kentucky's Governor's School of the Arts. In 2013, Professor X was the first African-American writer to be named Kentucky's Poet Laureate and native of Danville, Kentucky. He earned his master of fine arts in writing at Spalding University, and the University of Kentucky awarded Professor X an honorary doctorate of humanities for his work with the community and his artistic achievements, and Transylvania University awarded him an honorary doctor of letters. We're delighted to have you with us this evening, Professor X, and so please join me in welcoming Frank and Lorraine for a great conversation over to you both. All right, thank you. I appreciate that generous introduction and I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to talk about poetry anywhere, anytime. I think it's supposed to be easier because I'm technically at home and doing this virtually, but I always miss being there in person. It's, I love the intimacy, especially in a conversation. And I really believe that what we're about to have today is it's more of a conversation than a kind of a stayed interview. So Lorraine, I hope that's not asking too much of you. And instead of doing anything else but poetry, I'm just gonna read to you to get us started, to get you into space so you understand what's in the book. All I'll say about the book is that mask man black pandemic and protest poems were started during the COVID pandemic as part of the National Poetry Month prompt, where I was committed to writing a new poem every day for the month of April. And for whatever reason, I usually don't do this. I decided to make everything I was writing be connected to COVID since it was such a brand new experience for me. And there was so much that I did not understand or that was shocking. And for me, poetry has always been a way to ask the hard questions and to hopefully get answers. And if nothing else to process the anxiety, one might feel when they don't understand what's going on around them. So that was my safe place. And unfortunately, unfortunately, at the end of April, I still did not feel safe. So I was still writing, I still wrote a poem every day until the middle of July. And so this collection I'm reading from came from that series of poems. That's probably enough in the way of introduction to a book. I'm gonna try to read a variety of poems in less than 15 minutes that give you a full sense of what the book is trying to do and how many different places. When you first hear the word pandemic in COVID, I think the natural response is to go somewhere negative or to put yourself in a defensive posture, even philosophically. But I'm gonna start in a different place because one of the beauties of, one of the few beauties of COVID was being forced to stay at home, which is for me was a rare thing. I was always on the go, always traveling way too much. So I got a really generous opportunity to spend more time with my family and rediscover that I loved them and missed them very much. And when we decided to go outside, we had a chance to fall in love with our yard. It had just been a place to grow grass for several years and we started gardening again. And like most things, my wife's approach to it and what she got out of it was very different than mine. So I'm gonna open up with a poem called Baptism by Dirt for Shana. All believers know about the power of water, though not enough about the power of dirt. My mama used to walk barefooted in our vegetable garden, get down on her hands and knees and almost pray in the dirt. My wife and I in our three-year-old built and planted three raised bed gardens. Watching her dip her fingers into the dirt to coddle what will feed us reminds me of mama. And then what is it that women know about nurturing a seed into a piece of fruit, about believing in the power of dirt and suns and water? Our return from our labor with sore knees and back, fingernails and hands cake with dirt. She floats back into the house cleaner, somehow less burdened, as if she spent the weekend burying all of her heavy things, as if she whispered to something sacred and it whispered something back. Yeah, she's an avid gardener now, like her mother. This next poem is a lot more political than that and it tries to take things that came right out of the news. I was really stunned when a major food corporation finally admitted that the icons on their breakfast products were actually racist and came out of a racist tradition. So you hear references to a syrup and a rice and a pancake mix, but you also hear some other names and references to very contemporary issues that were happening during the protest part of the multiple pandemics. This is called Mrs. Butterworth, Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima. Mrs. Butterworth, Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima walk into a bar in America. Butterworth says, I'm being repagaged. Ben says, I'm being rebranded. Jemima says, I remember when they branded my mama on her back. The bartender says, I could stand in the middle of Main Street and kill somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters. Butterworth says, then I'll take eight bullets in my sleep. Ben says, choke me to death with your knee. Jemima says, lock me in a holding cell and say I decided to hang myself. The bartender poured the drinks, said he felt threatened and was simply standing his ground when he thought the thug was reaching for a gun. The headline said, well-loved American foods resisted arrest, failed to comply and were delicious while black. Butterworth's daughter said, here's the progress. We might finally get an anti-lynching bill. Ben's son said, I'd rather they abolish qualified immunity. Mama's kids said, you know, they abolished slavery once. Then they hung my mama on that box. This next poem is an example of a persona poem. It's one of my favorite things to do, particularly when I'm talking about historical events. And it's not quite history yet, though it is in the past, but I imagine that sometime in the future, my grandchildren will read about what has occurred in the last two years and think about it as ancient history. But this is about the George Floyd incident, public lynching, and it tries to get some distance between the reader and the listener by being the voice of the need, complicit at most. I am no more guilty than the officer's eyes choosing to look the other way. Technically, I was not even touching his neck. All I could feel was the hot cotton insides of Alfred Sharvin's slacks against my skin. Almost nine minutes is a long time to kneel on the neck, especially if you are unaccustomed to praying or begging. But after pressing all of me down, he put this all on me as if he was planning to propose, but got cold feet and was too embarrassed to get up and just walk away from this altercation, marrying us both to this moment till death do us part. And just a few more and we'll get to the best part of the program, questions. DJ battle. One of the things that I missed the most about the pandemic, got clamped down and shut down of activities was going to a summer concert. And I really love outdoor old school summer concerts and what happens with DJs and all the things that are about the birth of rap music. So this comes out of the era and has the epigraph that says, when the looting starts, the shooting starts, called by President DJ Trump, DJ battle. The oppressor's private property is always more important to the privileged. Their power is what police protect. Backed by a National Guard, fronting the commander in cheat, known to incite and encourage violence against POC by the FOP, another good people versus thugs. If you don't understand this behavior or these people, you don't understand emotional or psychological trauma. You don't understand generation of grief and you really don't understand injustice or American history. No justice, no peace, no justice, no peace, no just ice raids, no guilty cops, just us, dead, dying and chalkmarked over and over again like some wack DJ, rewinding the bridge or dead refrain scratching at our eyes with already viral breathless black body porn professionally made by the hands, feet, and now knees of thug police again. But instead of turning the tables, we drag out turned tables and spin and spin searching old wax seeking to sample something human, anything truly good to mix with this black in our lives until we match it. And I'll close with a poem that, if I can find it. Yes, I'll close with this poem of, because it asked a hard question, is any of this laughable? And I had this idea, this theory that, you can test whether or not you've recovered from a traumatic event by your capacity to hear a joke about it and then laugh and we're not quite there yet, I don't think, but this is called Too Soon. So a smallpox blanket, a Tuskegee experiment and a Republican governor all walk into a bar in Atlanta. It seems that everything, even the dark and the difficult was funnier before COVID-19 if left to real comedians. Dave Chappelle's blind black clansman skit interrogated the complexities of race and the irrationality of American racism. Richard Pryor's personal struggle with addiction offered up humor, born out of darkness and pain. They were rarely silly and goofy for saccharine's sake. Never mean spirited, targeting someone less fortunate just for laughs, making comedy self-deprecating without becoming menstrualcy is an art form, is a gift. We won't know if we can really survive the coronavirus until somebody makes a joke and it only hurts a little. So thank you. I think that's a great introduction to what's inside these pages and Lorraine. Let's jump into this dialogue. All right. Okay. I'm gonna start a little bit of history, just a tiny bit. And if you could talk a little bit about, you are an Afro-Lacian poet and I wanna make sure our audience understands Afro-Lacian and what that means and why you thought it was necessary. It's fascinating story if you could just, does that give you enough of a question? It does. I'll try to tell the short version. The Afro-Lacian poets are a ethnic collection of writers which began in Lexington, Kentucky, officially 30 years ago, 1991, wow. And most of us are still not just practicing writers but most of us are in the academy in some capacity as administrators or teaching full-time. All of us have, we figured out very early that if you're gonna commit to poetry, you probably need another job as well. And teaching turned out to be the best compliment to a life as a writer. We all determined very early because of summers off and winter breaks and spring breaks on some campuses. Because we all wanted to write, we had our own personal stories to tell. And that word is born out of going through a reading that had been renamed when they added an African-American writer to the collection. The first lineup featured the most outstanding writers from Appalachia and the title reflected that when they added Nikki Finney who at the time lives in California, they scratched that title and called it something else. And I left an amazing reading and made it all the way home still wondering about why they changed the title. Took the time to look up the definition of Appalachia in my dictionary from that era. And it said, the white residents of the mountainous regions of Appalachia. And I was stunned by that because it automatically erased the whole groups of people of color who lived in the same space. And I didn't understand how something as official as a dictionary can make a choice like this. When clearly most people knew that it wasn't a 100, but it also fed into how powerful the stereotype of the region. And even worse, all the negative characters and how powerful they were that people still believe them. So I wrote a poem trying to interrogate that idea. And at the end of the poem, I used for the first time the word Appalachian. And I took it up to my writing group as we met every Monday night for two hours. And my favorite writers, we had been meeting together for about a year, but there was something about the words of them that got me excited. And that very night we named ourselves the Appalachian poets. It felt like that, what that word did was create community to do the exact opposite of a word that left people out. And we wanted a word that included as many people as possible. So we decided to be the voice of the silent and muted and to help people find a voice and to be heard. I think we're all young activists in training. And so the social activism that probably connected all of our work continues to this day. And if we all write about anything that's in common that has to do with family and identity and place social justice. And in my case, history is a big theme of mine. So that's the short version of that story. Okay, because it was interesting when I was listening to some reading and listening to other things of yours. And you were also, I mean, this whole, a lot of your work, you wanna uncover the people that haven't been heard, right? But you also made this really interesting, like nobody says, let me see if I get the names right. No one goes, oh, George Clinton and Appalachia, Carter Woodhouse and Appalachia. And I think it's fascinating that you're connecting the two like that. And you also bring even more rich heritage to Appalachia by doing that. Like, I don't really know if I have a question in there, but I found that just very fascinating. Well, I think I hear you. And to me, of two things that happened to me mentally, I was trying to understand how a space, a physical space with so much, not just so much authentic African-American history, but we're talking about African-American historical figures who set the pace in their art forms. August Wilson, who, I mean, is one of the greatest American playwrights, who wrote 10 plays that as recent as three years ago, won several Oscars, for fences. So these, and that comes out of the Pittsburgh, African-American community, that people somehow try to render invisible. If you go the other direction and go down to Birmingham, Alabama, which a lot of people don't consider Appalachia, but even the ARC has designated it as an official space in Appalachia. Of, you know, you have activists, you have amazing poets, you know, like Sonia Sanchez comes out of that space. You know, if you think about history and civil rights, the bombing, Ham Nickname came out of Birmingham. And, you know, most of the visual images you see when you look at civil rights video from the era, young Cuban water hose down the street and having dog symptoms. And a lot of that comes, you know, out of that same space. But there was something about, you know, that space in between Jesse Owens, who we all have heard about forever, but have never heard the word Jesse Owens, the name Jesse Owens and the word Appalachia mentioned in the same space. You know, musicians, you know, Nina Simone, Beretta Flack, Bill Withers, athletes, movie stars, the Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman, all from Appalachia. And I could go on and on. And this litany of names is so long, you wonder how a little Abner and the Beverly Hillbillies can outshine and silence and render invisible all those individuals when it comes to thinking about who's in that region. And so how a definition as late in the world as 1991, that suggests it was an all white space could survive is just ridiculous to me. So a lot of my work is involved in challenging that notion and hoping people will question their own definition of the region. And sometimes it's a very clinical scholarly look at the same region that just goes through and lists numbers of people who live there, people who live in what I consider the outside cities, outside of the traditional spaces Appalachia, but they're from Appalachia, but they've moved to other cities to find jobs and to work, but they still consider Appalachia home because their grandmothers or grandparents or they hope to be buried back there or they go back every Sunday to eat, to visit the family reunion, to all kinds of events that never separate them from the space. So to me, I've never limited or created geographical limits for what we consider Appalachia, it's more of an idea. It's more of a claiming space and making sure other people are challenged to see it differently. And one of the biggest compliments has been seen in other groups, named themselves. I know at least one Cuban Latchin, the Asian Latchins and Arab Latchins who all inhabit or born in the space, who claim the space, and who felt like that, they were closer to Appalachia than Appalachia, especially if that definition didn't include them. And if you look at all the mass media, even of Kentucky by itself, you think about the power of a Kentucky fried chicken and they have a hillbill, the Dukes of Hazard, justified at least the first season, those films and media products still perpetuated the stereotype and the character of all white space. And once they saw that, they could sell the other things that deal with culture and literacy and ignorance and the value system that is insulting on almost every level. So it's mission work, just telling a story, but part of my mission is to say it as loudly as possible and as often as possible and do it with poetry. That way it doesn't hurt as much when people are challenged to rethink something they thought they knew. Right. Can you say again what your mission was? You got like... Oh, sorry. Our mission was to say it as loudly and as often as possible, whenever we got the chance. Oh, okay. Yes, yes, definitely. And I'm just, I don't want to get, I want to get to your poems, but I just have one other little question, which is you were a fiction writer by education, but you decided to move towards poetry and I'm curious why you did that. And I mean, and poetry as a way for you to also speak about history. You know, I'll do the first part of that first. I'm often asked that question, but I don't feel like I chose poetry. It shows you. Not only did it choose me, I think my lifestyle only allowed for poetry to become my primary voice. I might be the busiest person I know. And, but I'm comfortable with that. I like that speed. I'm not comfortable being my mother would say lazy. She really believed the idle hands by a devil's workshop. She was a professor minister between two years and she raised 11 of us in her house. I'm one of 11 in total. And even in high school, you know, I played all the major sports. I worked at the school I was a student. I was in five different organizations. And then it became a base for me that I was able to maintain. I was out of comfort, I think because of that. I started looking for ways to express myself through literature. I had enough time to write poetry and to collect, gather it. It took more time than I had to write fiction. Me, I need large chunks of time to really create good, solid fiction. I could write a poem in the airport or on a bus ride or driving a bus in the necks. And I could hold it in my head till I get home or till I get to a place where I could go. Fiction to me requires much more than that. As a consequence, I've written a whole lot of poems and my fiction has happened but it's just really, really slow. I kind of just began another rewrite of a novel that I started 10 years ago. And in those 10 years, I think I've hired some of these books and poems. So even at this point in basketball, they say, take what the defense gives you. That's my approach to being productive as a literary person is just, how much time do I have? What, 30 minutes? Okay, I'll read some of it. I'll end the poem. What I've got all night, all weekend, I'll drag out my novel and work on that. I've got four weekends. But as a, now I became a young parent, a committed parent, full-time parent. And it really helped prioritize my time and there's no such thing as extra time. And I'm also a playwright and a visual artist. So it's always been a big challenge, getting what I thought was a great idea and trying to figure out what is it supposed to be? And I'm done with this thing. Sometimes a theme might be echoed in multiple spaces because I just can't let it go. One of my personal obsessions is the middle passage, considering the trafficking of African peoples into the new world in Northern and South America, and Caribbean. And so if you look through my visual art, you can probably find 10 different examples over the last five years where that theme has come up. If you look at my written work, you can probably find 10 different examples. That's where it came up. If you read my fiction, you find at least two references to the same thing. And I think that as writers, I think that's how we do battle. Where I created, is the kind of unearthed the things we are obsessed about. If you read my work closely, you can not only find out my political meanings, but you can find out what I'm obsessed about and who I'm obsessed about. Right, right. Thank you. I'm just doing a quick check-in. I am every once in a while losing you, not losing you, but you're freezing, but it could be me. So I'm just- I hear a buzz. Yeah, I do. Okay. But you're not freezing. I think we're just fighting a little bit of a bad connection and we're just gonna have to go through it because I don't think that there's much we can do about it, unfortunately. Okay. So I wanna, let's get to this book. And I have, well, I have so many questions for you about this book. So you started writing it for Poetry Month. And would you've written for Poetry Month anyway? But it seemed especially important to do this now. And when you write for Poetry Month, do you have any kind of rules you give yourself or how you approach a poem a day? Well, you did say COVID-focused, COVID pandemic, Black Lives Matter, what was going on? Did you have any other rules you give yourself for a poem a day? Yeah, well, for that particular series of poems, it was even broader than that. I was just saying, write about the thing that you can't let go of when you lay down to sleep at night. Ah. And so I would say the poetic process for those poems began while I was sleeping because sometimes I was worried about those things and wake up with these ideas that my subconscious had worked out. So they give me with these early lines just to get me started, but I've been working on them for six hours. And now I was on and put them on paper. But yeah, I tried not to limit myself too much as far as where the poems, I want to give them a chance to speak. I trust them to tell their own truth. And the editing process would catch them when they're wrong. That's the power of the craft, for me at least. And now when it switched from the pandemic to protests, it had as much to do with the fact that that's what was happening on the news. We were already in a very low place with the pandemic and thinking, being afraid of how long this was gonna last and the impact on our lives. And thinking just when we thought it couldn't get any worse, then boom, COVID was no longer in the news, but it had not gone away. There was other thing that was even more horrendous than that. And then that's turned into, from George Floyd, there were so many other individuals, you can say that some of those are just being tried today and this past week that it seemed like this litany of names and events and occurrences were just happening over and over and over, like it was on the Spain cycle. So it was another kind of, I thought about these multiple pandemics or multiple fronts and the emotional toll on individuals called in the middle. I lost a lot of loved ones in the last two years, a lot of good friends, a lot of relatives. They announced yesterday on the news that 10,000 people have officially died from COVID in Kentucky. And I thought that's a lot of bodies. That's the same number of African-Americans who fought for the union in the Civil War from Kentucky. So that number, I try to visualize those numbers, it's surreal. So because of that, there was nobody in my house holding my hand and saying, I'm your therapist and just talk about it. My wife and I and we have a teenage 16 year olds and a three year old at home. And we would just watch the news and go silent and not be sure what we should be talking about, but all sharing that thing that you get as if you're at a funeral. And so this parade of death happened for so long. The book struggles to find something that deals with humor, struggles to find something that deals with a kind of pure love that pulls it out of that negative space. And I was trying to do that because I was trying to explain how we survived that first year, what we did, what we had. And there are poems about me feeding birds and watching birds. And I hadn't been committed to anything that important to nature in over 20 years. Suddenly, there was something about the process that made me feel more whole and provided a level of healing and made the world make more sense. So I think we were unconsciously trying to create our own medicines and make sure that when this is all done that we were still here. And at least take responsibility for making sure we're here in case COVID has a better idea or a different idea. But we weren't gonna help. All right. Well, you sort of like went into my next question in a way because I was thinking like it must have been very difficult balancing positive and negative thoughts. And I mean, every day you could probably write something that was negative or disturbing or violent or destructive. And so finding the positive, but also putting you put, how many poems are in here? 80, about 80. So when you put them all together, was it hard to make that picture? Was it hard to put them together and balance the positive and the negative? And I'm curious what you wanted to give us when you were done with that? Well, the one thing that the editor and I agree on was we didn't wanna separate the pandemic from the protest because they overlapped and they fed each other. And we also didn't want them to be chronological. We really wanted to have poems that played off each other. I learned writing a book about mega Evers and his assassination that if you put too many negative poems together that people can only take so much. And there comes a point where they won't turn another page. They just decided to bow out because it's just too dark. So I didn't want it to be so heavy that people wouldn't get all the way through it. So a lot of the poems that are lighter, our place, we're their place because this is where you get a chance to breathe. But these are serious subjects. So we can't take for granted, we can't treat it lightly. We have to deal with it in as honest a way as possible. But at the same time, we have to protect ourselves and give ourselves a chance to breathe. Right. So we can go on. And that was the only logic to the order. The only thing we struggled with was what the last poem should be. What do we want to leave people with? And we flipped through several times trying to find the happiest poem and decided that that was an unfair task. I mean, you don't have happy and COVID in the same sense. It's not real COVID if everything is happy and happy. But we decided to just think about breathing. Where do you want to leave people in their breath pattern? You could leave them at some place that takes their breath away or you could leave them in a place where they find themselves almost meditative because they've slowed down enough to see people in things close up and in a real way. I think there's a poem I have that's dedicated to people who worked in factories for poultry processing because there was an idea at some point that the economy was more important in people's lives. And there were all these companies around country that had these extremely high rates of COVID deaths and they weren't protecting their employees. There was no PPE yet that hadn't been figured out and they had figured out what they needed. And eventually they were able to get everybody gloves and put up at least plexiglass device between workers and then the mask came and those deaths were plateaued. But before that it was happening and it never made the news in the same way that you have a personal relationship with Native America and several reservations. And even today most people have no idea that in the United States the worst cases, the most situations that look like it's more than the pandemic yet it looks like genocide is if you visit Native American reservations and see how many peoples were devastated and just wiped out. I mean the numbers are horrific. But not unlike the prison system, things that happen in those spaces are outside of the regular news cycle. And so if you don't read about it, it's like it doesn't exist. So I wanted to make sure that I had a chance to hold hands with those spaces as well as my own spaces and communities. Especially when we found out that people of color were dying at a higher rate than anybody else period. And then my own personal losses were happening. So there was no easy direction for anybody. There are no winners in this thing except maybe the people who get the money from the COVID tests. Somebody's paying for those and somebody's getting paid. So okay, I have a question for you. Since we're getting heavy and negative, we got to do that thing. Like you said, I'm going to go a little bit more positive. But I'm curious about how you lay the poems out and I never know with poets if this matters. But like sometimes like, I don't know if people can see this, but it's got a shape to it. And I was curious about the shape and you also have a couple poems. I believe owed to meat packers. You read the poem and you have to turn the page to get to the next three lines. So like within me, I had to pause, turn, read. And I'm curious about that kind of structure and like, is it intentional and that kind of thing? Well, my easy answer is I think of punctuation. I think of white space even as part of punctuation. I think of punctuation as stage direction, directions in a theatrical piece. Oh, sure. And I want my poems to move. I want them to, when they stop, it clearly understood how many beats that is. How much breath you have before you go to the next thing. I'm really conscious of those kinds of choices in the crafting process. The first poem you mentioned is about weather. And one way of reading it is just about weather. We know it's not just about weather. I wanted it to be shaped like a funnel cloud. Okay. Tornado. When you look at it officially and then when you read about it, it's not just weather, it's dangerous weather. And so I'm always looking for multiple layers of meaning. I'm really committed to as many people reading my work and appreciating it no matter what level of education they have. The biggest compliment I've ever gotten was regarding its accessibility. And I've even had a man come out to be at a book fair and say to me that I don't write, I don't read poetry. I don't even write poetry, but I keep buying this damn book and giving away. And then he bought three more books. And I'm thinking you got to read some of this if you think it's still worth giving away. But I think he was older than me. So I think he came out of that space in the world where being a poet or reading and enjoying poetry somehow meant something weak about you if you were a man. And so I remember when I first started writing as a college student, writing in that space, how private I was about what I did. I was very public as a playwright and a visual artist, but the poetry I kept close to my chest. And I carried a journal, but it didn't look like a journal. It looked like a sketchbook because people know I was a visual artist. Nobody ever accused me of being a poet. And eventually I grew out of that. But I inherited that idea of what poets were and what poetry did and who it was for. And I've been trying to do battle against that ever since then because I think everybody deserves poetry in their life. I think that your quality of life is severely impacted by how much art is in it. Writing and creating work as art, it's not just for the people at the university, it's not just for rich people. And so my subject and my subject matter often try to go every possible direction so that at some point, if you finished a whole book, if you didn't find yourself in there somewhere on a page and I felt I wasn't thinking about you, even if it's a collection of persona poems about another historical figure, you should still be able to find yourself as the poem is also, it's about Meg Evers' wife lamenting the loss of their privacy and looking at that metaphorically and realizing that the poem is also about a miscarriage. And that opens up a window for other people who have experienced that kind of pain to step into that poem and not even know who Meg Evers or Merley Evers, anything about them but be able to identify with that pain in that moment and then they're there. It's their poem, it's their book, it's their collection. It's about them and it's for them. I always want that. And I don't ever want to be that poet just writing for other poets or just writing for the Academy or there's poetry that I've read and I just don't like, I mean, but I know it still sells and people love it. But I wonder, you know, how conscious is the decision to write in that way and who you're writing for? And I think for me, it is very important to me that people that I grew up with participate in my art and can find themselves in it. I would say if you don't find yourself in this book of poems then you can't possibly be breathing because it's very, there's something, I mean, whoa. Jennifer, Jen says I have to open for questions but I just wanted to ask you one thing about the title of the book because I do have to give a nod to Paul Dunbar who is an Ohio poet writer. And I don't know if when you were writing this you kind of went, oh, Dunbar's poem or did you say in the beginning, oh, Dunbar's poem? And I just wanted that connection not just to hear, just curious what kind of connection you had between Dunbar's poem and yours. Yeah, I'm very familiar with the poem. I had memorized and we recite in academic spaces but it's always been a powerful poem to me and for me it's also one way to acknowledge where I came from and who came before me and whose work I'm in the tradition of. I never pretended to have invented an art form or anything but I know that Langston Hughes and Paul Dunbar are much better poets than I would ever be. And so it's a nod to them it's a nod to that era that's that great work and it also acknowledges that you're going to see the same poems over and over again throughout history and it opens up this window to talk about it and compare two spaces in history now and then and it's, you know, there's a whole lesson plan on that one page. Oh yeah. But forces the unknowing to do some research to look up his work and either come across the dialect poems or the consonants beside how political he was trying to be and accept the fact that none of that was accidental that he knew exactly what he was doing and see how the poems can still live today. That's to me, that's the biggest barometer. It's how long would this work be valid? How long would it speak to people? You know, think about how much I love music and how my teenagers have always been frustrated when they think they have a new song. They don't know it. It's just a reboot, you know, has been rebate and they catch us singing it too and they are so disappointed that it's not brand new. Many people say Shakespeare has that quality because his work is kind of eternal. I think the same thing about Stevie Wonder and his lyrics and Marvin Gaye and his lyrics and the activism and the beauty in the art they created. They didn't compete with each other. They inhabit the same space and that's all I'm trying to do is respect that and those examples and to, you know, cover up my own space there as well. Right, right. Where was I going with this? Anyway, I think we should open up for questions even though I want to ask you 20,000 other things, but, oh, I just, regarding the Paul Dunbar, I will say that there were, I went again and looked and I read the poem again, which is, is it also called Masked Man Black? Dunbar? We wear the mask. We wear the mask, that's right, we wear the mask. And then I started reading again and like that he was an activist and he was, and it's like, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. So your way of writing, you're also teaching me history. You're also, your work is thought provoking. So I'm going to go on and compliment you to the end of time, but I'm going to let some people ask you some questions here. Do you ready for that? Well, it depends what they ask, but let's see, let's see. All right. So I'm going to moderate the chat for you, Frank X. And we actually already have a couple questions in chat. For those of you listening, if you'd like to raise your hand and unmute yourself to ask a question, that's fine. Or if you'd rather type it into the chat, however works best for you. So while you're thinking about that, I'm going to read our first question, which was early on. And I believe this is in reference to the definition of the Appalachian people as being only white. Please correct me if I'm wrong, Judy, on this. Judy Kerry Nevin says we had a book discussion earlier today on Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming and talked about what gets left out of telling family history and how that affects a person's identity. Judy would like to know how did discovering that you had been left out of that dictionary definition affect your picture of your identity? I think it made it more visible to me. I think that I didn't know there was such structure, such institutional lead efforts to erase me. And I took it personal. And it was easy to commit to actors and artists to try to do battle against that. And then be a champion of the same people who were victimized in the same way. I think that I was in upstate Washington, the state of Washington, the university campus. And I just finished the reading and the Q&A started and the young men have asked and asked me if there were other black people in Kentucky. I was stunned at first. Do I look like a test tube baby? What are you saying? And I quickly understood that he had never been to Kentucky and everything he knew or believed about Kentucky came to him via the lens of the television and mass media. And thanks to the power of Andy Griffith and Beverly Hillbillies in that era, there were people who still had seen deliverance and were moved by it, but also accepted the caricatures that would be advanced. But all those media images pushed forward this idea of an all-white space. So I remember pretending to count all the black people in Kentucky for the young men who asked the question. I think it was about my siblings and then my mom and dad and my grandparents. And I think he was really waiting for me to find the number. But then I moved away from that and just talking about the power of doing your own personal research, of going to find out for yourself. And then research became this awful new weapon for me. I could never run out of things to write about because I love the research process. I've taught whole classes, whole crack classes, based on taking my students to the archives and giving them a set of questions that forced them to create brand new creative work based on something they find that not only is interesting, but connects with them out of that space that they never even knew about before, that that discovery process becomes part of the birth of this new gym of an idea. And I've never been disappointed at the quality of the work that comes out. And I'm never surprised at how stunned the students are that they can actually create good work that they're proud of from that process. And of course the people in the archives love the class and we always close the semester with a major reading of the work they've created because they all finished with a chat book, a mathematical chat book from whatever they researched. And we read it in that space and it really has gotten my students closer to recognizing how important research is. Without it, you're stuck writing about yourself and telling your own story. And I said earlier, I was pretty quickly bored with me and my story. But I love history so much. There are so many stories that haven't been told. And often I say that I write them as poems because I can't afford to make the movies. And thanks to smartphones, that no longer is true. You can make a movie for free just by downloading the free software and knowing how to manipulate the device and understand how movies work. So should we be looking for a movie coming from you soon? Actually, I've co-produced several, but the last book of poems connected to Lewis and Clark and this York trilogy that I've written was purchased by a film company in California and they are already in pre-production to make a feature film about York. Excellent. Wow. I'm excited about that. It's been a strange process because I don't know anything about Hollywood. But I've had the opportunity to spend time in spaces with the filmmakers and men was the company. I went out to the Nez Pierce Reservation with them for almost a month over the summer, three summers ago when the pre-production began and it was just amazing to watch how they work. And they work at such a different scale. They financed the movie in advance. I don't know that I would ever have to go get $30 million to finish the book of poems, but to be able to do that is just amazing. I'm going to humble just to be as far away as I feel but as close as it seems. I mean, it's not life I would trade for, but I've loved the kind of built-in excitement that just comes with that relationship. I think I look forward to seeing what that artist does with my material. That's the one thing I had to learn. Once the artist, which is the director and the editors, who was creating the vision for the film, it's their piece of art. They're not necessarily trying to tell the story that I was trying to tell. They're trying to find a piece that speaks to them. I just hope it's not so far away from my story that I don't recognize it, but they already paid me so it doesn't matter. I'm glad, by the way, they're doing this. Of all the things I read, I'm like, that York, he's got to be a movie. So congrats on that. We do have another question in the chat and Judy would like to know what's going to happen to the poems you didn't include in this book. You know, good question. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe, I guess it depends on what COVID does because I thought several times that I stopped writing when I did so I could pull together the book. But the same kind of stuff is still happening in the news. Was it worth starting up again and trying to do it a second time? Then I thought, you know, I'm not sure I could carry that much pain again. It was not an easy process. You know, swimming in that kind of darkness for, you know, a month at a time, it seemed. So, you know, I think that maybe they end up in kind of an unpublished collection or best of, I mean, not, you know, I like to, you know, on my best days, I think it's, you know, the same thing that Prince did, just put it all in the vault and pull out all these unpublished books, you know, when I'm gone. But I hadn't thought about it. I mean, that's a fair question. But I like to think that the ones that are in the book are not just the best ones, but they're the ones that told the story of the period the best. I want people to be able to pick up this book years after COVID and want to understand what COVID was like and the time in America was like and read the book and go, oh, I get it. I hope it works like that. I hope it lasts that long. All right. We had a few more questions come into chat and bear with me while I catch up with all you fast typers. Steph Kendrick is asking, well states, I imagine taking on this project was mentally and emotionally difficult. How did you separate yourself from the work when you needed to and how do you like to wind down? Well, my process does allow that to be easier for me. I'm most creative in the morning. Ever since I was in high school, I've been able to wake up at 4.30 every morning, no matter what time I go to sleep without an alarm clock. And I wake up ready to write. I start the process for me has already begun before I open my eyes. Because when I'm really in a creative space, I learn a special process that I don't mind sharing that exploits how our subconscious works. If you give yourself a question and you can't answer it immediately, but then you go to sleep, your subconscious doesn't sleep. So your subconscious will work on your question while you are asleep and may even solve it or find the answer for you and then sit there and wait for you to wake up. So sometimes when you wake up in the morning and something pops in your head immediately, that's just your subconscious. And the answer has been there for hours, but it's been waiting for you to be conscious enough to receive it. I'll undo that when I first start writing your books in the York Halls because not only would I be devouring whole books at a time to try to learn as much about 1803 and the expedition as I could. I had an IMAX video that I would watch that recreated the journey to the Pacific Ocean. And I would watch that as I was falling asleep. So I would ultimately dream about being on the expedition. And part of that also would be a company by question that I may not have known the answer to. For example, like most enslaved individuals, York didn't know when his birthday was. He couldn't have known because it was so unimportant to his owners that they might just record the year and not the actual day. And because he was treated as chattel, there were no birthdays and those kind of celebrations in most cases. I'm sure there's some examples where that is not actually true. So I remember watching the videos and then asking myself when was York's birthday or when would it have been? And then just having the most beautiful and powerful dreams and waking up the next morning and writing out this poem that was an additional trigger in the crafting process because I was also using the actual Lewis and Clark journals as seeds for new poems. And my birthday is June the 11th and I found a passage about York in the journals on June the 11th. And I used part of that for the epigraph of the poem about his own birthday. So that's, most people will read that poem and not think anything about it. And whatever they thought about it, they wouldn't think there was a personal connection to me. But in the same way that I always try to sneak in my mother's name, her name is Faith. But in the period of the books, I put, I capitalized it so it looks like a name. And every book I've written, there's Faith is in there. And that's for my mom. And in this particular case, this is one of the things I did, I just hid just for me, my own birthday inside of an actual entry from the actual journals that happened to advance the story and the way that it needed to do and do this additional thing at the same time. And I always love it when that happens, but get a poem doing extra work with a double duty creates a kind of density that makes it more accessible to more people. Great. Kelly Broughton would like to know how long have you been taking your students to the archives and have you noticed any changes in the way they, the ways they interact with those collections over that time? I've, you know, the only changes that in the beginning it was such a foreign ideal to my grad students that they were a little apprehensive about. Then they got to the point where some students were choosing to come to the program because they heard about how the archive is used. And they were history buffs or potential archivists or they read some of the material produced. And it's a really broad, you know, sense of, it's more about how to use the material and how to harvest it and process it for new work. And it's never too far away from where you are as a writer. For instance, what I do is at the very first week of school when I teach the archive class, I asked my students to give me three or four topic areas that they're very interested in, you know, let's say pioneering medicine or, you know, miscarriages in the 18th century, you know, divorce or, you know, anything, whatever, but it has to be something that you personally are interested in. So I send all those topics for each student to archives and we have such a good relationship. What they do is they know that two weeks from that date when they receive it, that my students are going to show up. And what they do for those two weeks is they start coming through archives and pulling everything they can that touches those topics. So my students come in, they have a whole bookshelf of material that includes photographs, films, books, letters, documents, posters of anything you can imagine that might spark a poem or a new idea. And so when they come in, you know, they learn how to use the archives and they find out the regular hours of, and I turn them loose, you know, they use, they have to come there and they can't check out the archive stuff because it's in archives. But, you know, they give us a whole classroom space in archives in the old library. And that's where we have class for almost a month. And then once they get the seeds, then the crafting process starts and we finish out the semester, crafting those poems born out of the archives into a collection that is thematically linked. For me, the most successful set of poems came from a young woman who was interested in dementia because both her grandparents were experiencing dementia. And in her archive, she came across a set of photographs that were slices of brains of people in different levels of dementia. And for her, they liked the Rorschach test. They looked like certain kinds of things. And so that's where she began and the poems that came out of that process were made richer because she also had her own grandparents love letters to each other from World War II. And what they were saying to each other then and they were still both alive and interacting, but they were very different people. So she added that as another layer. All the research she did in advance to understand everything possible about the process of... And I regretted that we only had a two-year program because if she had another year, it would have been the most amazing book. And I still use those poems as examples for other classes to see what they can reach for, what they can aspire to. But you never know what it's going to be every year. It really is driven by whatever the students are interested in and whatever they can find in archives and what they choose to be triggered by or what kind of taps into their own personal obsession. It's very important to me that there's some kind of emotional link to the poem you want to write even before it gets there. And then it helps almost guarantee the fact that that poem, when it's finished, will have a temperature, will have some emotional currency. And that makes it more accessible to people. I think that's what poems remind us of our own humanity of they become more useful to people. It's not just this two-dimensional thing on the wall or not just pretty words that sound good when you write them, but they make you travel, they take you someplace else. And I think that my goal when I do a reading is the same thing I will for my students when I listen to them read is that I want to be exhausted after 30 minutes of reading. I mean, I want to be exhausted emotionally because they've taken me there. They made it easy for me to go with them. And I want to have been made to feel sad and to understand how to tap into that, the pain, all the examples it comes with, using emotional currency on the page. It's just about understanding how you feel and accessing your capacity to articulate that as clearly as possible. Thank you so much. We do have one last question in the chat and I don't want to leave anyone out. Kevin Courtney is asking, how would you set up your poems to create a critical space for needed conversations? In other words, how do you prepare a group to talk about the issues around your poems? I assume that people are reading. I rarely go into a space to talk about particular issues. I may have to deal with censorship because of the grade level. I have been given a list of poems of mine that I could not read when I arrived at certain schools, which was quite flattering to me. But they discussed topics that didn't want to discuss in those schools, but I'm thinking, that's exactly what he is wanting to talk about, that you make taboo. But that was an argument for another day. I try not to control that. One of my favorite things to do when I go to a space as a visiting writer is not do introduction. All the students, they may have done whatever level of research, but they may only know I'm a poet. But they have to ask me what they want to know or need to know about me before we do some work. And they always come from a very interesting... I mean, the information is better. The questions are sincere, and I'm always surprised at what they feel like they need to know before they trust me for the next hour to lead a workshop. But it's a much better process than just reading my accolades. Most young people aren't really impressed by that. And it creates a kind of divide between you and them from the beginning. But if you leave an open-ended and only tell them what they want to do, then I think it creates the beginning of a relationship and they trust you more. At least that's my goal, and I feel like that's what has happened when I've done that. Well, thank you very much for that answer. As we wrap up here, I am going to share a couple of links with our audience. The first of which is to your publisher where they could purchase Masked Man Black. And I would also like to let everyone know if you are here in the Athens area, Little Professor Books has made an effort to get several of Frank X's titles in. So stop by and see Nick and pick up a few copies. And then the second link is going to be a survey to just get a little bit of feedback on our event this evening. Beyond that, I just want to say thank you all so much for spending your time with us this evening, Frank X. Thank you so much. This was wonderful. We really, really appreciate your time. I hope you get a nap very, very soon. There's basketball on TV tonight. Also, probably not.