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On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths' closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day.In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the seventeen years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College. Together, they embraced their literary foremothers—Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, to name a few—and fought to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures.In The Flower Bearers (Random House, 2026), Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love. This is a conversation not to be missed.Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a multi-media artist, poet, and novelist. She received the MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is the recipient of numerous fellowships including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Kimbilio, Cave Canem Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Yaddo. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies, and periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Progressive, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, Poets & Writers, American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, The Writer's Chronicle, Transition, American Poet, Mosaic, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Best American Poetry (2020, 2021), The New York Review of Books, BOMB! Magazine, and many others. You can find Rachel on Instagram.Learn more about the Torch 20th Anniversary celebration here.Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Listen to Black-Caribbean-African American poet Arisa White from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, New York — now residing in Maine — share her experience working as a tenured-track professor from-home during the pandemic with her wife. Her experience as an adjunct professor teaching a hybrid-online-in-person course using Blackboard and Canvass prepared her to teach online in 2020. When Covid-19 spread and college campuses closed to prevent the spread of the virus, as a poetry professor Arisa focused on how to recognize the humanity of her students who were distance-learning on Zoom, without trying to teach them something: “How can we use this moment as an experience for learning language, about story, about the contours of our fear?”She shares about what her online book tour on Zoom was like for her poetic memoir, Who's Your Daddy?Arisa's words:On 2020“Thinking about life as a poetic performance.”“We're-all-in-this-together feeling.”On 2021“Everyone was all Zoomed-out.”“Everyone was falling apart.”“After spring of 2021 I just cried... All of these existential questions… What is the world coming to? What is my purpose?”On the Black Lives Matter movement:Arisa speaks on George Floyd and Briana Taylor… She speaks on the expectation of people of color to perform diversity and equity.On the mask-mandate:She talks about taking a road trip with her wife from Maine to Florida and seeing the change in the amount of people wearing masks indoors. She saw a prevalence of people wearing masks in the tri-state area and D.C. area, which changed to people not wearing masks in Virginia and Florida, which she was fine with. When she visited museums in Florida, she wore a mask inside.On the vaccine:She shares how being a person who is medically exempt from getting the vaccine she experiences negative reactions to her non-vaccination status, which she fears will lead to an apartheid system wherein she is disallowed into certain spaces regardless of her negative-Covid-19 status.On loss:Arisa shares about her cousin who passed away in June of 2020 and Cave Canum poet Kamilah Aisha Moon who passed away in September of 2021 and bell hooks who passed away in December of 2021.Check out Arisa's publications and awards here: https://arisawhite.com
The queens revisit Lucille Clifton's poem "won't you celebrate with me." Then the queens are NOT. HAVING. IT. with misogyny in an Anthony Hecht poem. Consider supporting and shopping at Loyalty Bookstores, a black-owned DC-area independent bookstore. You can listen to Lucille Clifton read "won't you celebrate with me" here (the text of the poem is available with the audio; ~1 min). Read more here about The Clifton House. Writers and artists interested in participating and developing Clifton House programs may contact Sidney Clifton at cliftonhousebaltimore@gmail.com Watch Lucille Clifton read "Sorrows" and "What Haunts Him" at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival (~2.5 min)The title of the new selected poems is How to Carry Water, Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (American Poets Continuum Series, 180). Starshine and Clay is Kamilah Aisha Moon's 2nd book from 4Way, published in 2017. Tracy K. Smith has a great essay on Clifton that appeared in The Paris Review and you can read that here. Smith's edition/selection of a Clifton-centered tarot deck is available here.The beginning of Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" is "I caught a tremendous fish," not "terrible fish," as James says. You can hear Bishop read that famous and much-anthologized poem here. There are absolutely scholars who defend the Hecht poem as lampooning Matthew Arnold's / Victorian notions of gender and romance, but these queens remain unconvinced.
In a slight departure from our regular format, Jack offers a brief remembrance of three recently departed poets - Kamilah Aisha Moon, Etel Adnan, and Robert Bly. Links to more information about the poets and to the poems read in the episode are below. Learn more about Kamilah Aisha Moon, here: http://www.kamilahaishamoon.org/ Read Disbelief here: https://poets.org/poem/disbelief Learn more about Etel Adnan, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/etel-adnan Read an excerpt from The Arab Apocalypse, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53855/xliv-from-the-arab-apocalypse Read an excerpt from The Spring Flowers Own here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53851/from-the-spring-flowers-own-the-morning-after-my-death Learn more about Robert Bly, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-bly Read "Why We Don't Die" here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/152560/why-we-dont-die Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking Find us on Twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetry You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at closetalkingpoetry@gmail.com.
Recorded by Kamilah Aisha Moon for Poem-a-Day, a series produced by the Academy of American Poets. Published on February 2, 2021. www.poets.org
Today's poem is The Emperor's Deer by Kamilah Aisha Moon. This episode originally aired January 29, 2019.
The author of Starshine & Clay (2017), featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" as a collection that captures America in poetry, and She Has a Name (2013), a finalist for both the Audre Lorde and Lambda Literary Awards, Kamilah Aisha Moon's work has been published widely, including in Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Poem-A-Day, PBS Newshour, Buzzfeed and elsewhere. A 2015 New American Poet who has received fellowships to MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook, she has featured nationally at conferences, festivals and universities including the Library of Congress and Princeton University. She holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College. Her books are available for purchase here.
The author of Starshine & Clay (2017), featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" as a collection that captures America in poetry, and She Has a Name (2013), a finalist for both the Audre Lorde and Lambda Literary Awards, Kamilah Aisha Moon's work has been published widely, including in Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Poem-A-Day, PBS Newshour, Buzzfeed and elsewhere. A 2015 New American Poet who has received fellowships to Vermont Studio Center, Hedgebrook and Cave Canem, she has featured nationally at conferences, festivals and universities including the Library of Congress and Princeton University. She holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College.
Writers & Scholars event featuring Kamilah Aisha Moon reading from her book of poems "Starshine & Clay".
She Has A Name (Four Way Books 2014) by Kamilah Aisha Moon is a startling collection that dares to intimately address the way a family transforms when caring for an Autistic child. Deemed a “biomythography,” (a term coined by Audre Lorde), the works are cautious in their rendering and respectful in their assertions. The reader is taken into the minds of each family member as they navigate the joys and difficulties of shifting their own perception to meet that of a loved one who experiences the world through an entirely different lens. Although we are not offered insight into the mind of the youngest sister, I dare say she is the poetry, she lives in the verse that we the readers must decipher and make our own. In this debut collection, Moon also offers a singular view of the speaker in later pieces. Although there is a disconnect with the voices of the family, the speaker carries them with her as she wades through the world Mysteries of mass wrong turns, sick leaders and sirens forever sexy land or sea. The unequaled rush and horror of forgetting ourselves. I believe this collection will be a companion to many souls sorting out their past and present realities, reconciling themselves with the worlds they’ve been given, and seeking to translate the many layers of existence into one, readable language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
She Has A Name (Four Way Books 2014) by Kamilah Aisha Moon is a startling collection that dares to intimately address the way a family transforms when caring for an Autistic child. Deemed a “biomythography,” (a term coined by Audre Lorde), the works are cautious in their rendering and respectful in their assertions. The reader is taken into the minds of each family member as they navigate the joys and difficulties of shifting their own perception to meet that of a loved one who experiences the world through an entirely different lens. Although we are not offered insight into the mind of the youngest sister, I dare say she is the poetry, she lives in the verse that we the readers must decipher and make our own. In this debut collection, Moon also offers a singular view of the speaker in later pieces. Although there is a disconnect with the voices of the family, the speaker carries them with her as she wades through the world Mysteries of mass wrong turns, sick leaders and sirens forever sexy land or sea. The unequaled rush and horror of forgetting ourselves. I believe this collection will be a companion to many souls sorting out their past and present realities, reconciling themselves with the worlds they’ve been given, and seeking to translate the many layers of existence into one, readable language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Episode #101! Featuring Kamilah Aisha Moon and music by El Amparito. Kamilah Aisha Moon is the author of She Has A Name (Four Way Books, 2013). A recipient of fellowships to the Cave Canem Foundation, the Prague Summer Writing Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and the Vermont Studio Center, Moon's work has been featured in several journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, jubilat,Sou'wester, Oxford American, Lumina, Callaloo, Essence, Bloom, Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. A featured poet in conferences and venues around the country, she has also led creative writing residencies for several arts-in-education organizations in diverse settings. She has taught English and Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College-CUNY, Drew University and Adelphi University. Moon holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. A native of Nashville, TN, Moon currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Kamilah Aisha Moon reads her nonfiction piece “Rikers Island Writing Workshop,” published in Issue 10 of Superstition Review.
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