An Artist, A Poet, Two Novelists: Four Interviews on Women, Race, Diaspora, Identity, Language, Sexual Violence, Friendship, Fragility, Beauty

Newfound Interviews, Autumn 2020

April Sunami

Black Women, Front and Center: An Interview with April Sunami

April Sunami conveys a warmth and generosity, a depth and brilliance that carry into her art. A visual artist, focused on mixed-media painting and installation, she is attentive to the world around her and to the world within. The palette she draws from is ever-expanding, whether in response to those nearest to her, the art community, or the greater Black Lives Matter movement. Her attention to black femininity and strength, and her use of oil and acrylic paints, textiles, maps, seashells, and shattered auto glass, create powerful and majestic works of art. From life-size canvases to diminutive studies, her paintings have a presence that calls forth, that summons and then demands consideration, reflection, and awe.

Eloisa Amezcua

How I Was Taught to Love: An Interview with Eloisa Amezcua 

Eloisa Amezcua’s debut poetry collection, “From The Inside Quietly” (Shelterbelt Press, 2018), the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón, cracks open the concepts of identity, language, perspective, persona, and voice with a blend of observation, confession, reflection, and a fierce gaze on the world. There is a curious lens in these poems that creates distance and, simultaneously, invitation. Observe, but don’t touch. Get closer, but understand, the universal leans toward what is specific, private, cautious.

Hayley Krischer

Somehow We Control the Narrative: An Interview with Hayley Krischer

Hayley Krischer’s debut novel, “Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf” (Razorbill, October 2020), is a phenomenal look inside the minds of two high school girls—Ali, who has been sexually assaulted, and Blythe, who makes her way into Ali’s world with the intent of protecting the assailant. Straightforward and unflinching, the story leaps into emotional territory, traversing a landscape of best friends, high school cliques, crushes, drugs, parties, bullying, and outright sexual violence against young girls. In a voice that is searing, honest, and original, Krischer has arrived inside the world of YA novels with a topic that deserves serious attention.

Leslie Hooton

Finding Beauty and Happiness: An Interview with Leslie Hooton

Leslie Hooton’s debut novel, “Before Anyone Else” (Turner Publishing, 2020) is a story of hope and vision, reimagining spaces where we come together to celebrate meals and each other. At the same time, it is a story of restoring more intimate, fragile worlds where misfortune and happiness exchange places. Surrounded by loving, dynamic, southern men—her father Hank, brother Henry, and “best friend” Griffin—Bailey Ann Edgeworth grows into a young woman able to visualize and transform unrealized spaces into beautiful upscale restaurants, which reveal the owners’ and chefs’ individual stories. Ambition and imagination lead the Atlanta native to New York City, where success and the idea of love lead to trouble. True friends and family help Bailey find her way home, a path that reminds, as well as restores.

Have Many Rabbit - by Lucie Brock-Broido

On her way to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Sister Mary Aloysius

Drove past many signs: Earthworms Here. Have Many Rabbit. Calicos

In Burlap Sacks for Free. There were wooden crosses, some upsided

From a weird wind of such flaccid heat

Through miles of nothing much—until a shrewd

Of cottonmouths braided in a knot so vast

Across the asphalt She had to stop the car.

She waited as they wound and ragged and sieged their way across

The two-lane road, and then she traveled on.

For Sale:

Rafters of Slack Turkies. Nurse-Cow’s Pail. Push hoes, malt forks, unrusted

Mangleknifes. Here is the sheriff in his hammock on his clutter-land

Not quite yet woken from his dream of herding

All the Negroes out to anywhere

But here.

Sister Mary Aloysius carried in her pocketbook

A blue transistor radio (with hymns, which lived inside) to the man

Waiting in the heat and soil of the death house in Angola not too far ahead.

The warden would, in short order, confiscate the thing.

Music, it is known, he said Stirs the emotions.

As it stirs my emotions, too.

I cannot bear to hear it anymore.

Myself, I listen now only to the sound

Of right-wing radio at home and on the roads because it quickens me,

Keeping me abroad, awake, and chary by its miscreance and gall.

From time to time a rogue joy overtakes me

And I fall off the wagon of my diagnoses (pernicious melancholias), obtuse

And unappeasable to my own warden and

My pyschopharmacologist alike. A bougainvillea-colored cloud

Stays in one quadrant of the sky.

I’ve come down with

The woolly horribles.

I have fantods, I have rabbit, I have shame, even far from here—

In the Corridor. Where I am safe and warm and white.

I have listened to the Freedom Caucus in our House

Of Lords recite by heart

The full text of Green Eggs and Ham

In the filibuster of the over and the over and the over once again.

In my nightmares all of heat and red, of the Rorshachs of their throats

In the shapes of lumpy garnet yams, I am of

My country, it is not of me.

Image from the gouache on panel painting, “Open Space,” by Larry Moore.