# Video: New Voices in Poetry: Tawanda Mulalu, Isabel Duarte-Gray, and Jess Yuan April 10, 2023 On April 10, 2023, Sherah Bloor, editor of the *Peripheries Journal* at the Center for the Study of World Religions hosted three exciting new voices in poetry. Bloor invited Tawanda Mulalu, Isabel Duarte-Gray, and Jess Yuan to discuss their latest works. The works discussed include *Please make me pretty I don't want to die* (Mulalu), *Even Shorn* (Duarte-Gray), and *Threshold Amnesia* (Yuan). **New Voices in Poetry: Tawanda Mulalu, Isabel Duarte-Gray, and Jess Yuan** SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. SPEAKER 2: New Voices in Poetry. April 10th, 2023. SHERAH BLOOR: So welcome to the poetry program at the CSWR at Harvard Divinity School. My name's Sherah Bloor, and I have the enviable position of hosting these events and supporting the poetry community at HDS. This poetry program has been running for quite a number of years now. And we've invited many very impressive people to speak. So Robert Hass, Kaveh Akbar, Robin Coste Lewis, Fred Moten. Lots and lots of amazing people. We've got Tracy K. Smith in a month. So I was thinking, hang on, within our own community we have incredible people who are publishing, who are touring, and they're not speaking at our events. So I want to make this a regular event that we invite poets from our own community who've come through workshops with us, and we celebrate their work together. So this is the first of those events. I'm sure they'll be many of them. People seem to be publishing incredible books all the time. I don't know how they're doing it. These three poets, Tawanda Mulalu, Jess Yuan, Isabel Duarte-Gray, they made a trinity for me because I was thinking about how they all brought me through-- and these books all brought me through the pandemic years. And they've all been crucial in supporting a community through that period. I've been in workshops with each of them. I think there might have been periods when we were all in workshop together with Jorie Graham. And I saw some of these poems in their infancy. They've all either contributed to, edited, or in the case of Jess, even designed Peripheries, which is our literary and arts journal. And yeah, they're obviously the people to celebrate as they've given us so much. So I want to think about these three books that came out during this period. So in 2020, Jess published Threshold Amnesia. In 2021, Isabel published Even Shorn. In 2022, Tawanda, you published two books. How? Both Nearness, your chapbook, and Please make me pretty, I don't want to die. These are the books that we're going to celebrate. And we're looking forward as well into the future, thinking Jess is publishing Slow Render next year. I think Isabel's going to read from her new book as well, which I'm really excited about. So as I said, I was kept company by these poets during that period. And it was a really special period. I mean, hard, but incredibly special for us. We kept workshopping over Zoom, often through it. I ran all sorts of reading groups. My mother came. We all engaged with one another's family. And Tawanda and I read some Lacan. Yeah, I mean, it was for me an incredibly creative period. And what I was thinking of when I was reflecting back on it is that, it was a period in which we all had our solitude. But we all kept each other company in that solitude, which is the best company. And I'm seeing these books through that lens, I suppose. So we're going to go in the order that the books were published. So in 2020, Jess came out with her chapbook. And I still remember it was the beginning of COVID, so we couldn't celebrate indoors. But we had this really beautiful picnic. There was a cat. It was very euphoric. So I should say something about Jess. First of all, I'm not going to give a long list of all the journals that these three poets have published in because they're just all the best places, obviously. And also, the only place that matters is Peripheries, of course. So they've all published in Peripheries. That's what matters. But I'll say a little bit about each poet. So Jess, also very important that she was the designer for Peripheries for a long period. She also has a Master's of Architecture from Harvard. I think you're teaching studios now at Wentworth Institute of Technology at Boston Architectural College. So I mean, it's difficult for your first book to come out or your chapbook to come out just before the pandemic starts. And so I feel like we need to give it attention now. Proper attention that it deserves. It was selected by Justin Phillip Reed for the Yemassee Poetry Chapbook Contest. Yeah, I was reading his account of it, which I thought was really good. Just to revisit the book, I think certainly it is this archive of identity where you're taking these resources that are collaged. And he says, yeah, the collage, things are estranged from one another and isolated. And down every avenue, there's no absolution promised, or false promises are refused. And I thought that was really accurate. Even love is a trap. But I was also thinking his last line, he says-- He quotes you, and you say, a space-- I'm going to get this wrong, but there's a space or an empty space or is mine. And I thought, actually, that there was some absolution in that space that's allowed. And this quiet space for letting one be and not imposing something on people. And I felt like that really connected to what I was thinking, which was so special in that period for us, which was this space to be together but to preserve our own isolation that we needed to go through, I think. So anyway, those are my thoughts on your chapbook. And let's celebrate that and maybe you'll also read us some new poems, too. JESS YUAN: Yes, thank you so much, Sherah. Thank you so much for your reading of my work and for all of your readings, and editor, and workshop. Peripheries is really dear to me, and I'm so grateful to be reading to this community. I'm going to be reading some poems that were from that pandemic time. I think it was really a time of metamorphosis and transformation. And so this first poem I wrote after watching a How It's Made video on silk cultivation. This is "Work song as silkworm." Who renders each thread perfect? Whole. Life's work and still only one of thousands strung up the loom. Forming in the best case something lovely but not always. And then, for whom? Not for the love of it. Weaving their enclosures. Defining interiority. On the cusp of transformation, then boiled and boiled to such soft uses. Bending the use to the user. And we are meant to live with, build the entirety of our cultivations upon these antagonisms, which used merely as metaphor, can be aimed at truth or against it. I.e. squashing which spiders, wrapping cobweb over the wound. Yesterday I inverted two Ziploc gallon bags over my hands to meet the hefty worm, whose translucence extruded this compost. But would not touch its body. Would not say whose world it is truly. Not mine, but theirs. Theirs to the core and the thick mud slab beneath our foil city. Beneath the beloved 1 PM ray slanting into this rented yard. Managed by their despised economies. Enriching the deranged soil. How easy to ignore their work. How easy to be the stiff, disgusted human shadowing their mulch. Forming opinions. Crafting image by covering the silkworm in mulberry leaves, gathered by children who drink the silkworm stew. And while living alongside, do not make metaphor of the worm emitting the unbroken thread. The moth breaking the thread to emerge. The useless silk moth or the arresting hand unravelling perfection from its stead. You cannot see the brokenness of others like your own brokenness. You are not sure whose side to take. Is the revolutionary the worm or the moth? Is my work the thread or its undoing? This next poem I wrote after watching the movie Wild Nights With Emily. Came out in 2018. Based on some archival research from Emily Dickinson's work that's at the Harvard libraries. Great movie. This is "If I had really known about Emily Dickinson." I would not have felt so sorry for all of us for fearing the pale attic loneliness of waiting. Instead, throwing handfuls of my full-colored dress at the warehouse gossip of church. Thinking, if I had to choose life over art, then yes. Let me be the impure vessel. Let me never write on love. Let me rock the back seat of Hondas parked in the far corner of the farthest parking lot. Blue under the flat blue of this unromantic suburb. Better fingered in bathrooms than hidden away, because I didn't know Emily Dickinson was gay and lived exactly how she wanted. This would have been crucial teen info surrounded as I was by church auntie angst and suck it up, buttercups. But now I write love poems all the time. Writing, who hasn't felt love? Chipped into its puddle. Drenched in unrelenting want. Who hasn't suffered? This next poem is very much indebted to the workshopping of Isabel, Tawanda, and Sherah. "Untitled landscape." Stillness in the snow as blown-in foam. Acoustic insulation. Stillness in the cloud of my first winter. Plunging into it. Stillness commanding each quivering twig. Dead load for the roof. Stillness along the gutters. Each snowflake blurring past its target. Each snowflake knows the rules. No map if they all fall downward. Stillness if we follow the map. Stillness in her meat hands fumbling for the doorknob. Dorm. Embarrassed by, again, choosing the doorknob. Numb and polished and impossible and round. Then every vain needled awake. Every pipe protesting. Rattling hot air through the radiator. Tree sap through its xylem base. Reluctant with its sugars, its rooty demands. But needing, after all, to be a part of it. Not only the part which sprouts and rises and curls, dries, is burned or excreted. I mean the branch which decides for the light and decides over and over to come back. Yearly thickening its rings. The sheer mass of its work. The work of each one pound squirrel eating one pound a week. The work of that transformer, gnashing, refining one cashew at a time. The work of accumulating, drop by drop. The lake of fat, which is all squirrels. The work of us stirring the vat. And then there is will. You think if I were mouse, I'd have the will to mouse? Like, thank god for my daily peanut? No. My next poem goes out to the love of my life. This is upon the occasion of our engagement. Also one which was workshopped by this group. "Proposal at Great Lakes." How to find an opening before the inland sea, before the Colombian Exchange? The great American peace before Devonian climbers crawled to extinction along the sand-scuffed floor. Lumping themselves into life through the churning jelly detritus. Everyone with their gaping whores of mouth. Ten trillion tooth pins pricking one body through itself into another. How they form the world. I could let my hand scrape bottom, but I am afraid. Are you animal or plant? Are you home yet? Are you clean? I ask my stomach, that warm blooded mammal swimming shoulders down in the clear. Remembering. The gut shelters a rich colony. Each germ must live in the same blather of a world. First they were alone and ate sunlight. Then they ate each other. Dead and living. One body of many. Then our organs began to join hands and cooperate. They saw difference. The foreign mess. Made skin to separate the fleshy interior from its glass-shelled room and soap bubble globe. I am wearing it like our apartment. Brick rubble washed into red pebbles. Rebarbed between boulders at the pier. Curly pond weed choking up the embankment. Invasive flora as green as the real. Are we lucky it grows all over? Whale oil days of the lighthouse above a slow archaic current. Ravenous lamp light thrown through clever shards of glass. Industrious diminishing beam foundering out into the glacial bowl. It was just one man waving a flag and shouting. It was many men burning off the river's oiled sludge. Era of what is chosen and what is not. Absence in the name of its root. Long, bloody years of the current. Frost and eroded and diluted and renamed. And then choosing its merging with the lake. Yes. Water chooses the new form of the land by crawling it over and over. That is my choice, to crawl the garden with you, beloved crawler, in the world of what comes. Opening out its lake in long, trailing folds. I'm just reading my greatest workshop hits. So this next one was also one from that summer. "I'm talking about joy." I mean how I may never learn from it if there's always both yes and no, catching porous and crumbed at the throat. And if you do not see it also, the underlying freedom. Smooth stone tiling the swimming floor. Rough stone tiling the world. Of these our summer years, spent a hum one leaf then another. Wanting the biggest leaf of them all with a long line of everyone awaiting thanks and credit. God and history, inventors of refrigerant, deodorant, management, and parent. Yes, you make up a part of it like everything else. You are stained in the dish also. And what is this culture I am a part of? Does each cilium know that the rest of it is a waste of praise? No praise for the institution. No wasting of sunlight on the asphalt's tar heat. It must fall upon the grass and leafy crown who make something of it. Praise must be thrown there to the quivering strand of life on its own work. Crushing the slimes together. New, new smells, useful, pinning up and taking their legs. Eating tin. Outgrowing our planting pots, our hermit crabs and baby shoes. And do I need another pot with no room on the terrace? This terrace with its corners to sweep and muck under the great wheel of time cycling into its autumn. Cretaceous. Hurricane my name. October, February, July, Revolution. Portentous dodo birds shooting off their toes. It takes a great deal to imagine something other than that. Whatever we imagine now must know the slope and soil. I cannot draw up each doorway in the city where every one of them knows and agrees. I cannot draw up the map to that city. We do not believe in perfection. We are not sorry. We laugh into our wrists. Still it is my most fervent dream. Still we can earn scraps of praise from the dumpster's opossum, the crabapple-drunk moose. Oh, to be huge and where the fuck we going. Still it will matter at the city's edge and further, where the snow hare must decide whether to cower in meadow browns or winter whites. I am not deciding. I am just telling you how hard we all try. My last poem that I want to share was written for Isabel. This is "Craft talk on pain for Isabel." Art being also the years spent laying plots for kindness. At five, gouging my knee on the Slip 'N Slide's plastic anchor. Watching surprised, basking in sympathy beneath warm featherweight love. So unlike Neosporin. So greedy was I for more care in the make-believe room of blue equipment. Glass skin. Iron lung. I imagined my self worth tending to. The ones around me agreeing. I peeled off each scab from its jelly. And this summer, emerging from our sea swim with speckled and red algae with my trauma-bonding bitches, you thought the clinging seaweed was my bleeding leg. But pain is not what pierces us together. I recognize you to the neck and blue cold opacity. Submerged together in its shock. Stirring hidden numbing elbows through its suffering soup. Grateful to withstand the withstandable. Trying to not take any of it personally. The scraping cold. The filter fee. There's muck. Joy. And if I haven't learned my lesson, that's why I can't be an artist yet. Owning what I weave from pain. Taking offense. Taking it personally. Unmasking the relative safety in which I imagine myself unscathed. Unable to mark even real outlines around the image of real safety. Big blue dream of safety as a hardened plastic shell. Water off a duck's back. Hiding behind the ones who will hide me. Oh, water, you're pulling this cruel and wind life crinkling shingled skin. So submerge me, so no one gets the last word. Thank you those were my poems. Thanks for listening. SHERAH BLOOR: That was so incredible. Did that just introduce Isabel for me? That's the perfect introduction. I don't know. It's really beautiful. I also think to write a engagement poem like that, and beloved crawler is just-- I mean, it's so fantastic. Yeah, very hard to do that. And yeah, so successful. OK, so Isabel. I mean, that, sorry, that poem that was just written for you made me remember-- I wasn't going to say this. But made me remember that, I think it was about a month ago, someone we know who was a bit distressed and was upset, I was talking to them. And they said, I just need to speak to Isabel. And it was just this really beautiful moment of like, yeah. Sometimes you just need to speak to Isabel. OK. Isabel. So I hear you're an assistant professor of English now at Sewanee. Sewanee. I don't know how to say-- OK. I'm going to run out of the excuse that I'm not from America in about-- I've been using it for eight years, but a bit longer. PhD from Harvard. Friend of vessel. You publish this right in the middle of the pandemic, and it didn't-- That was just an unfortunate time to publish it. It's really unfortunate. And we really, really need to celebrate it because it is such a brilliant book. Boston Globe, best books. It's listed. Published by Sarabande. You're raised in Kentucky and the book is set there. Covers four generations of your maternal family. I reread the interview that you did with Edith, who was another person that was in our workshops. And it was so good. Everyone should read it. I think it's in Full Stop. And it's a really good interview in there. I'm going to just say some things about the book as a way of introduction. Revives the pastoral, not at all in an innocent or romantic way. Reinvents this. This is a site, as it should be, of real violence, real poverty, people's lives, people's actual histories, intergenerational violence, gender-based violence. It's specific. And it doesn't let anything be generalized or easy. It just hangs on to the specificity of each history and each person. I think I read in there that Jorie said, this is very interesting, it's the point of a knife touching a map. That's such a good image. It's an incredible image. Another image, just like I've had this for a while. I read it. How did I not notice that on this plant are teeth? These aren't flowers. I was like, nonsense. But, yes. This is apparently a Solomon's seal. And those are teeth hanging off it, which now makes sense because I did know that Even Shorn as a name is a reference to "your teeth are like a flock of sheep" from the Song of Solomon. So what else do I say? I mean, I don't know how much you're going to read from this book or from your new book. I want to hear a lot about the new book because I feel like we were talking about it and preparing for it. And we're all waiting to read the next book. So maybe I should let you read now. Thank you, Isabel. ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY: Thank you, Sherah. And thank you, Jess, that was so beautiful. Can you send me a copy after this? OK. I'll text you later. Hi. I'm actually going to read from the new book exclusively just because, I don't know, I thought it would be fun. And we're among friends, and I just thought it would be-- fun may be the wrong word. So let me introduce the book and then I'll start reading from it. So the basic premise of the book that I'm writing about is that sexual assault is a form of epistemic violence and that we do not-- I mean, it's obviously a form of physical violence. But I'm interested in it as a linguistic problem, as a discursive problem, as a way of failing to define human rights in a really fundamental way. And a lot of it is interested in the relationship between the social contract or the state, and the experience of being sexually assaulted. So I'm going to start with the first set of poems. They're all taken from specific appellate court cases in various states. And I've written about them. And I have rules and so forth because I think representing sexual violence can be disturbing and frustrating, and maybe not productive in a lot of ways. I'll give you a sense of what I'm going to represent. But just a warning, I will use some explicit language, but it's only language that's quoted in a public record appellate court case. And you'll see what I mean. So the first poem is the first state in the union, it's Alabama. And the case that I drew it from is one in which-- you'll see what I mean about the epistemic violence. A bunch of young girls in a middle school tried to basically complain about sexual harassment. And so their administrator felt she couldn't take their word as it was. And so she tried to do a sting operation to catch this male student and she failed to show up in time. And so a middle schooler was brutally assaulted. And that's all I'll tell you about that. The only thing you need to know is that I'm going to read it twice. I'm going to read it side to side first and then up and down. "Alabama." Hill v. Cundiff, 2015. I am a girl child. Where girl is defined by a hole in my lips or Alabama soil, recomposed by a temporary order. The logic of protection. Where protection is defined by a sap-stained hood that shields an engine of violence. Where violence is defined by the hit and run that butterflied our mothers. Here. Where girl and child cannot share one body. Bleach stings the soft skin of my nose. Where girl is defined by protection we need from the man who protects us. Here. Who loves us? I am a girl child. My lips are Alabama soil, recomposed by a temporary order of protection. Here. Bleach stings the soft skin of my nose. Who protects us? Here. Where girl is defined by a hole in the logic. Where protection is defined by a sap-stained hood that shields an engine of violence. Where violence is defined by the hit and run that butterflied our mothers. Where girl and child cannot share one body. Where girl is defined by protection we need from the man who loves us. I'm going to do one more from the section and then move on to the ones that are about myself. And I'll explain those. Just warning, this one's going to have some graphic language in it. And it will be quoted, so I'll start now. So "Arkansas." Henderson v. State, 2012. Quote, "The lips are clearly part of the mouth. And a rational juror could have concluded that appellant pushed his penis past the victim's lips as far as her teeth, which satisfies the statute's requirement of penetration, however slight of the victim's mouth." Judge Wayman Brown. The victim in this case is around 11. We're gathered here today, ladies and gentlemen, to satisfy the statute's requirement of penetration, however slight. As far as her teeth, ladies and gentlemen, there is a insufficient evidence of penetration of adult bicuspids. In light of the evidence adduced here today, appellant engages another person, who is less than 14, in wholly or slight penetration. The statute of deviate sexual activity is gratified, ladies and gentlemen, when a rational juror pushes past the words of a victim's mouth. So the next set of poems are about my own experiences. And a lot of them were written in the summer that we've been talking about. And so I'll just give you a brief version of what they were, which is, I was groomed by my high school history teacher for four years. When I found out, realized what had happened as an adult, I looked into it, and it turned out I was one of somewhere between eight and 10 girls that he serially did this to. Complaints were made from the year 2005 all the way to 2018. And including one of mine, which is in 2013, I provided a lot of physical evidence to suggest that this had happened. And nothing happened. So as a result, many worse things happened to other people than did to me. But it felt to me like the attrition of women suffering was never going to weigh-- if you think of sexual assault as a trolley problem, right, they were not willing to allow a man to suffer any kind of public humiliation. And it took 10 different girls to make it matter enough. And a couple of things. So the way that we eventually got him, he was actually under investigation for rape, and the school was still not going to fire him. So I published everything that I could find about him in an interview that I gave with a local news station. And after that happened, this is important for the poems, his mother died shortly afterwards from a stroke. And apparently he tacitly blamed me during the eulogy. So there's that. And then finally, one note is that the teacher who replaced him found my high school college application essays in his desk after he resigned. And they were 13 years old by that point. OK. So I'm going to read all of these, all in one shot. Dear, there are two orders of living Americans. Those with lingering doubts about the murder of JonBenét Ramsey and those without. When you're child size, the grocery checkout sells the post mortem contents of a six-year-old stomach at eye level beside the other afterthoughts. The Globe, The Star, the Snickers, the Juicy Fruit. What is the child if not a ransom note that babbles on? I've wasted more years than she had years. And all told, she racked up more dead than alive. Pageant, from the word pagina, page. The mystery cycle when old Europe pantomimes the word. Let us circulate the mystery of virginity. Let us remake a certainty of violence. Dear, they talk of losing it all at once. The way you'd lose a key or a game of Candyland to a neighbor's shitty kid. They do not talk of wind slowly scraping softness from your face. Or how funny it would be to find that softness tucked away in a drawer and think, we're still a little soft. Are we? Or are we all of us, the eight of us, the 10 of us, approaching range on the Mohs scale reserved for women with their cigarette lighters, virginally born inside the pack of Parliaments. The way our landlady's was when I was 15. The day she planted bowling balls out front like seeds to a vine that led anywhere else. Dear, if I killed your mother, I am so sorry. I know nothing counts before the word but, but I had no choice. Each new day counts so little, yet I forget to remember what to forget. Churlish letters I wrote at 17. Your class ring in my mouth and a handful of hair. Yes, my old hair, like the witch stirrups in an ornery horse's mane. I've never begged a man for sex before today, but every first time is a refusal of someone else. I still see you half expecting applause for her eulogy. And I can't love a man with words. I can't stomach what it is to be unloved and witnessed unloved in a single sentence. When each new minute is a chicken with its neck half wrung. I'm so sorry. I am so sorry. Dear, I go to heaven, I want to ask, is there such thing as a tasteful lawn ornament? How does one improve a grass rhombus to such hue as to declare oneself bound by contract to poison all surrounding flora until Scott Pruitt's oh face leaks Scott Peterson's crocodile tears. A second question I'm saving is, when is pain real? Does it require two persons? One to throw and one to sign the affidavit. Is pain a compact between one person's body and the willingness of anybody else to see it? Dear, the only man who knows no diminishment is the hoarder. The headline of a Founder's Day parade in Cairo, Illinois shares his mantle with his late wife's ashes. A woman you will never know says, this vow of indiscrimination is vibrance. Annihilating joy. The mind trip hand to the shape of things. Unbridled by their use. The parable of the sower but in reverse. If you and I could manufacture joy, but swallow equally the grain of pollen and the lost thatch of broom, perhaps then. But only then. Dear, I tender words now only to one question. If reincarnation remains a child's nauseatingly sober, soberly nauseating party game, is this a rental? Did I put holes in the walls in the wrist-slitting years you called a bid for attention? If true, was I better than an ant drowning in a glass of absinthe? A hound licking Henry VIII's running sore. A warehouse of debeaked chickens. The filament in all the lives that led here like the callback to an underwhelming-- Dear, one look at your face, I know already, you will never see inside a house without mass manufactured carpets. Beneath the floorboards, cousins dosed in future fentanyl statistics. Christ chalked up like a folk musician. His pain long killed and never resurrected. Did you marry him for the good years or to band the bad ones into portion sizes? Do not worry. I will love you still like rain gone to ditch water, run off to the Cumberland, fled somewhere we will never see. Dear, if I die first, I offer you your first solicitation. Write my epitaph. I'll be at last your byline. Be likened. Suck the shine off a woman's name. Your mouth casts every word to caper a long century's death march in a jingling shoe. Each character at home atop an obelisk. A breastbone. A second mortgage. Sprawled across a summons, a state line astride a final resting mediocrity. Proposition a child. Print her name on the playbill. No callbacks, just the long unwinding of Apache curtain. All comedies end in marriage. All lives hush like a woman's tongue. Dear, July night, fire alarm, thick air. I hear the back hand of each whistle slap, each stare Hot rain rises from the trees. Wings gutter at glasses. Really, you've done enough violence to the leaves. And these grasses weep in heat when sheered by your loudest engines as if for sport. I love the New Balance stance of a man and his proudest who has done violence to an innocent lawn, or simply to an innocent. You turn so bloodshot when you blush. Caught upskirt a creeper bush? Gone pink, just like a maiden thief. Not you. Never. Not a thief. No, just embezzler. Dear, I deserve to be alone. The way I taste only cloying things. Is there a handrail to hold? Here in this thin corridor, I'm ingesting every flower like the cure for being born. Even now I embalm these eyes in cannabis and Kierkegaard and grubby old Anais Nin. No more of the slow-motion bar crawl. The color of a dress I should not have worn. Remind me who called this flower in French, the water's disquiet? Each petal is an eyelid oiled in blazing morning light. Oh, these magnolias shedding freshness. Surely some man has conquered the words. Stuff you'd need all four heifer stomachs to hold down. How much longer do I hold this blush? Dear, remember Days of Our Lives? Marlena was possessed by Satan and levitated, too evil to touch her 1000 thread count sheets. You said it was just her body. Marlena was gone. Was it obvious by the yellow contracts and the pack a day rasp of a woman who needs her hands busy? Is it something done to you? Just Inhale when it comes your turn. God's plan piles too high for one generation, so I witch dunk another Benzo in this plastic cup. I can hope for the best. The life times we lived between one drag and a next. What's the good in staying young when I never will be? Show me a gentle girl, I'll steal her face a minute. And what's the good in loving, trashing, dredging, bloating, burning? Just one sorry body. Like that alone would end creation. Thank you. SHERAH BLOOR: Thank you, Isabel. I remember those poems so well. I mean, the lawn ornaments and Marlena. Days of Our Lives. This is imprinted in my brain forever, but also the incredible brave project. And I actually, I didn't say, but when I was googling, I came across the article that explained the background to this. I was so happy to see it because I think when you started this project, I remember very clearly you weren't giving us all the information. We didn't know who this was. You were being very careful. And it seems like it's all out now. And it's going to be out in a way-- I didn't realize you're going to make it also a project about other girls' lives and other legal cases. Yeah, I can't wait. I mean, it's going to be incredibly-- it's a very hard-- to be excited about a book but also this is going to be so hard to read. It's also going to be so good. It's very difficult to know how to-- Yeah. Look forward to it. Your poetry has always made me feel like this. But it's going to be important for people like that. I mean, when I was introducing you, that bravery is important for all of us. Yeah. OK. Thank you. Tawanda, I always find this so hard, going from one person to another person. I don't know what it is between smells. You smell some coffee or put your fingers in lemon water. So we need some ritual in between each poet. OK. Tawanda, 2022. We've traversed these years, and somehow you publish two books. Nearness, New Delta Review. This book, Princeton University Press. OK. I have to say that Please make me pretty, I don't want to die is named a Best Book of 2022 by Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post. I also discovered today that it's on Audible. Everyone, it's on Audible. And guess who the reader is? It's Tawanda. So we all have to listen to that. OK. Tawanda, you're from Botswana. You're were a student here. You are our very, very good friend. I'm supposed to say something about what this book is about, which I was doing as I did with the other poets. Reading some interviews and some things you've said about it. And in one you're talking about aboutness. And how maybe poetry books-- it's complicated what a poetry book is about. Sometimes that aboutness just happens to you, and it's hard to direct. I mean, I feel like it's about everything that was happening at that time. Living in America as a Black African during that period. Prettiness, heartbreak, failure of intimacy, I think. Interracial romantic relations, one of which is extremely complicated because it's with Sylvia Plath, which was going to be really difficult for multiple reasons. Familiarity, alienation, and hope. Working with those students, I remember you were a teacher's aide, right? Teacher's assistant working with third graders and the love you had for those students and the hope they gave you. And everything of life and in every form. Sonnets, elegies, prose, poems. Everything of life and everything of your life, which makes it extremely special to us because it's you. And we all love you, and you can't help it. So I hope you're going to read some from this book or just anything you want. TAWANDA MULALU: I only read from the book because I don't have new poems. But first of all, thank you, Sherah, for that intro. I love you, too. I love y'all, too. And thank you, everybody, for coming to the reading today. I just want to say again how incredibly blessed I feel to have been able to workshop with y'all and Jorie and Josh. Yeah, no. I wrote this book when I was super depressed. And it's just nice to be on the other side of that insofar as one can really be on the other side of that. But having friends who pay attention to both your work and you as a person is an incredible blessing, so thank you all. I'm going to share my screen so you can actually see the poems because god knows what my lisp sounds like on Zoom. So yeah. If you don't feel like looking at it, I think you can pin me on the screen. And you don't have to look at the poems. But yeah, I'll read a couple from the book. This first poem is called "Prayer," which I also workshopped with everyone here. "Prayer." Everything I like is like that man who first thought to take that picture of that starving Black child, waited for by that black vulture in that Sudan. I like what I write. I'm hurting myself by liking things. My words are maybe taking pictures of myself starving me. I tell myself stories in order to clutch my throat. My throat is clutched. Please make me pretty, I don't want to die. I want to sleep now. I know I'm holding this so tightly with sleep. I know I'm screaming towards this with my sleeping. People are not asking of us because they are busy. I am not asking of us because I am simulating being busy. What should we ask of in a world whose only word is work? This is the best deal. This is the unasked-for gift. If I saw a starving Black child, my first thought would not be to take this picture of myself. Or wake. Everyone is dying. There are such pretty words for this. "Prayer." Though I fail you generously and deeply, I fail you, vertebra, arpeggioed rosetta. I fail you, ribs, glockenspieled rosetta. I carry your stone down with butterfingers and how early your shuddering mountain. Mist, blue sheet music, sciatica. The long nerve stretches into aching fibers. It does not gift my Black mother white wings. The Earth looms again. Wagnerian heavy and American cow stumble onto it with thick warm gases, readied now to be minced through drive-throughs. Sweetly you press tar onto soil. I examine pictures of us. My coccyx is gemstone. It waits for your eyes to fill it with light. Where I pressed my lips to you, flower me there. Nearly every gender humors me with silence. Nights I wish your thin nails come dancing. Nights I wish my legs look keener than purity. My mottled thing, I love you. My rattled old thing, I love you. My embryonic curses, I muzzle you here as rose-tinted lens. I promised you. They cannot see us here. Please, fail me harder. Fail me faster. Yes. Fail me. The next set of poems I'm going to read, they're called "Film Studies." There's three of them in the chapbook. I don't really know how to describe them. I like films. I briefly dated a filmmaker. That's pretty much it. "Film Studies." These Black lovers on screen save themselves from concrete. Credits roll. Once my mother throws a burnt log at my father. And it must be like this, holding on to love's inevitable reel. Once, the projection streams a finger corked into a heart. Knife wound. I tell the doctor, let go. Unmind the dark jet when my finger returns to me. Narrative saves us. If mirrors disappoint, consider white eyes. Then flood cinemas with light to drain the mind. So look at trees neutrally, says landscapes. A history book infects them with bodies. I try a different bingo. I don't go on walks depending on the news. There's always news. The lens should not have considered us, but there's a block party in the sky. My ancestors sway. I take pictures to envy white people. To envy my self, says mirrors. Shut this door. Walk away from lectures on stars. Schadenfreude the physicists as this universe fails us one last time. The sun's bad season looms calm. Perhaps we send someone to look, die bravely to prevent supernova. My body floats. Earth forgets me. The producers greenlight a sequel. Watch you finger the burnt popcorn at the bottom. "Film Studies II." I don't hate it here. Nor my need to be illuminated. Or to find myself in a museum cautiously advertised in a pamphlet. The statues fall at noon. We pulled them to the sea. Midnight I dived to press myself against bronze. How I enact white guilt, patina. Fine. I hate it here just a little. Let's meet like parallel lines. Or where you cut your finger while you snip film with that special knife. The source of the word cut. Cut past the resolving image of your scar. Cut past my breath. Leave reels. In the prequel I am given a backstory. Critics adore me there. Holding gold at the ceremony. I mouth appreciations. I say, oh. Maudlin tongue. They stream me away. Someone as Black as me drowns. I sip red wine. The image recedes. The water echoes. I hate that voice. I hear it here. It lives there in my teeth. "Film Studies III." I don't watch myself. Others watch, then draw. You draw me with your lens. It asks where my skin is bred. Films my right eye. Its oddity. White dot in pupil. Where a doctor saw no harm. My mother eyed its lonely milk. See me gently inside while your lens seeks my white thoughts, hidden inside my pupil's Black. My thoughts, I thought, were colorless. Or I thought you thought this. Or hoped this. Or what is your lens' draw of me? You said you'd ask of the white dot. And you ask of everything but the white dot. The white dot's draw of everything else of my skin. Always this soft excuse for everyone to ask me of everything but me. My skin is everything, is everything and me, anything but me. Is me. But you ask. It does not belong to you. I can't make it belong to you. And my girl makes films. I write. Everyone must draw. She is sometimes white. She is sometimes not. And I am Black. I am sometimes not anything but Black. Is drawing like breath. Breathe gaps between my lips. Breathe gaps between my teeth. My girl makes films. My girl is not my girl. I am not my girl's boy, not your boy. And what is being drawn if not who? And who is anyone to draw but love? Your lens here, my girl, my love, is what you ask with it, of me, of you of me. Is it Black. It is nothing. It is almost me, almost Black. Coax it and it breathes. Touch me and it breathes back. All right. One more for y'all. This one is called "Poem about my life mattering." And it's after June Jordan. Asked myself this morning, this usual, where is Black life found? Surely not in an atlas, given how they cull the size of the continent down as carefully managed roach control. But other nights I hear myself singing down a well. And it sounds a trumpet or at least the mouth of Joseph trying to have a good time, you know? When the stars decided the fly tanning on Mike Pence's picket-fence hair, was that Black life? And should I shed myself of that chitin and decide this Black self? And so grow a spine. Who must show it to? I wouldn't recommend history either, but Black life died for me to sip high-fructose liquids with less ice. No matter whose skin I wear, I can't laugh at that. A parallel history is right next door. And the neighbor's dog keeps barking my name. Thank you, everybody. Take care. SHERAH BLOOR: I don't know, Tawanda, how you manage to be so funny and so upsetting at once. It's so good. And then these lines, the fail me harder, it's so good. And just at the end of that poem, the dog. Yeah, these lines that are just so powerful. I am just such a big fan of all of you. Really, I just want to keep reading your poems. So can you please just keep writing a lot, and then we can keep doing this? I can just keep inviting you and then I can listen to your poems. That would be really nice. I mean, we've got a little bit of time. I mean, Walter says that was fire. Yeah. If people want to ask questions, yeah, do. Otherwise I might just ask each of you what's next? Maybe we could go in order? Go back to Jess and then just ask that. See if anyone has any questions but no pressure to. Jess? JESS YUAN: Sure. So the question's, what's next? SHERAH BLOOR: I guess. JESS YUAN: I don't think I shared this with any of y'all, but I'm going to get my MFA in the fall. And after this time of struggling to make room for poetry while being an architect-- well, going to architecture school and then being an architect, in which this crowd and Jorie's workshop was really my anchor as a writer. I'm really, really excited to have two years to really just make space for my writing. So that's what's next for me. SHERAH BLOOR: Congratulations, that's so fantastic. I feel like I knew that or maybe I just expected it or something. But that's so great. And that's going to just give you that time to write a third book now. Your third book, which is ridiculous. Amazing. Isabel? I mean-- ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY: Y'all know because I just read from the thing that's next. SHERAH BLOOR: I know, sorry. ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY: And in terms of where I'll be next year, I genuinely don't know. Because I'm in the job market, and so I'm in the middle of-- anyway. Not important. I'll either be in Connecticut or New Orleans or Utah or New York. One of those places. But yeah, thanks. SHERAH BLOOR: You also have a career as a scholar. This is what's amazing. I mean, Jess has actually just been an architect. I mean, Isabel is actually being a professor and also producing scholarship which is incredible. Yeah, so getting a job. ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY: Yeah, I'm getting a job. That's what I'm in the middle of. SHERAH BLOOR: Right. That's amazing. Tawanda, I know. TAWANDA MULALU: Yeah, like Jess I'm actually going to go get an MFA. Still deciding where I actually go. Yeah, I just resigned from my old gig. So not in hedge fund land anymore. So literally doing nothing. My next immediate plans for the next couple of months is just to get a lot of sleep. Stare at the sun. Not directly at the sun but experience sunlight and just feel as good as possible. Just vibe, yeah. SHERAH BLOOR: Brilliant. And I felt like it was my life's work to just make you leave that hedge fund self to poetry. I tried every method. I got him reading Marx. There was a concerted effort from a lot of us. So I mean, I can't say that it was my work that succeeded. But I feel very happy that you're doing that. TAWANDA MULALU: Not just because it's being recorded, it was a good gig. But-- SHERAH BLOOR: Oh, I'm sure. It was great. I'm sure. But I just think you're meant to be writing poetry. TAWANDA MULALU: Yeah, no, I'm very excited. I'm really excited. And any excuse to be in community and write and hang out with y'all is always an excuse worth taking. So I'm very happy. SHERAH BLOOR: Brilliant. So I don't know. Did I mention that all the poets here just-- I mean, they've published in some journals or whatever. But they published in this journal, and can people-- So this was the most recent issue of Peripheries. You can still get it at Grolier Poetry Bookshop. And all these poets have been at some point in time in this journal, or edited it, or designed it and hopefully will be in it again. And yeah. Maybe we could part. Let's just see. Give people a moment. I always feel like it's a bit much to ask people to listen to three really intense readings. They're really different and take a lot of work to recover from, actually. But you have to listen to them in fast succession. And then, by the way, you have to come up with questions afterwards. I feel like it's a bit much. At times like this, I used to always rely on Isabel to ask a question. She was always able. If you have questions-- Isabel, do you have a question? ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY: Yeah, I do actually. SHERAH BLOOR: I knew it. ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY: Because I never heard Jessica read poems one after the other, after the other before. You always usually workshop one. And so I'm used to thinking of you as somebody who writes about the feeling of obscurity and objection really, really well. But I don't know that I'd ever really thought about you as a comedian, but you are. You're extremely fucking funny. And I just want to-- Is that a quality that you have been cultivating in your poetry, or am I just a limited observer of your work? JESS YUAN: Oh, thank you so much. It was probably because in the years that we were together, I was super depressed and not funny. But thank you for appreciating that. I try. You guys also are super funny and beautiful people. SHERAH BLOOR: I feel like all of you are really funny, actually, and very depressing. You've all got those. I don't know how you're doing it. But very, very hilarious, very, very depressing, all of you. It's very confusing. Yeah. It's true. That squirrel, Jess. And it was a squirrel, right? That was really good. Any other questions, Isabel? Or anyone? Alex? Alex? Tawanda, I noticed that some of your lines are deceptively simple. This is interesting. If you want to speak to them. TAWANDA MULALU: Yeah. OK. Alex is still typing. I'm going to let Alex type some more. And I'll say something SHERAH BLOOR: OK. She's keeping on writing, I think. So we'll come back to that. Isabel, were are you going to say something or am I just putting you on the spot? ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY: I guess I wanted to ask, when you write, do you have someone in your head that you're writing for? Because I think all of us have very different attitudes toward our audiences. And I mean, obviously, I'm writing in the second person so often so that I have an incredibly specific person I'm thinking of. But I was curious, who are you-- So often a poem will have an official thou and an unofficial thou. And I was wondering if you've ever thought through who your official and unofficial thous are, and are there any-- I don't know. How do you think through who you want to read your poems? TAWANDA MULALU: Personally, I tend to imagine an ideal reader, just because for really bad and unhealthy reasons. I'm obsessive canonicity so I imagine a reader who would be able to pick up on particular references I make. Often the ideal reader is probably Black, I guess. And that's not intentional, but I think in some of the gestures I make towards Blackness, I try to keep them implicit. So I guess that's my official thou. My unofficial thou is, I say this all the time, but I still remember being absolutely miserable freshman year and reading a bunch of Morgan Parker to keep me happy. And so I guess my biggest aim is some really unhappy young freshmen watch kid snow in Boston, Massachusetts can pick up the book and feel better about themselves. Right. Yeah. SHERAH BLOOR: It's a really good question, actually. Really interesting. Jess, did you have an answer to that? JESS YUAN: Oh, yeah. I guess I for so long thought of poetic practices just writing to myself, just journaling, that I guess I didn't really feel that there was some person who was the reader. I think it was more about addressing my inner child or that embodiment of voice. But the varied spaces are so special. And so whenever I feel the need to be inspired, I just remember the warmth and love of creative community. TAWANDA MULALU: What about you, Isabel? SHERAH BLOOR: Yeah. Well, no. Isabel has very specific, though. ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY: Well, the official thou are usually unstated people who are extremely specific. I think the thing that tends to differ with me a little bit, at least definitely from Tawanda and I think also from Jessica, is my attitude towards my audience can be really angry. Not to say straight-up contemptuous, and I think a lot of that comes from the space of where I was writing that, all the things I wanted to say could not be said for one reason or another. And so I just feel like sometimes I'm trying to put a cigarette out on my reader's arm. And I don't know why. I don't actually want to treat my reader poorly by any stretch of the imagination, but there's some part of me that's like, if you're going to be invited into this experience, you have to pay the price of pain. I don't know why I'm like this. It's a problem. TAWANDA MULALU: I don't think that's a bad attitude to have, a, given the subject matter and societal attitudes towards it. That I think is a politically useful attitude. And then the second thing is, I think some of the most significant poems of the last century that were straight-up contemptuous to the reading audience, I mean, prototypical example, of course, is Eliot's "Waste Land." And I mean, yeah, sometimes that's annoying but sometimes it's genuinely fun for a reader to have to do in the actual work to match the brilliance of the poet, in particular. I think for you it's actually an extremely appropriate attitude because you're straight up a genius. So the contempt pushes us as readers and listeners to match your energy. But I do want to quickly answer Alex's question. SHERAH BLOOR: Alex's, it's gone on, so-- TAWANDA MULALU: Oh, yeah. The question is-- SHERAH BLOOR: Read it, yeah. TAWANDA MULALU: Oh, yeah. Sorry to refer to myself in the third person, but OK. Tawanda, I noticed that some of your lines are deceptively simple and they choose to align a particular aspect of themselves to betray a faint wholeness. Other lines that you see in their diction and reached the point of being abundant and flamboyant, ecstatically overwritten. You talk about when you allow yourself to enjoy the juice of language and when you choose to pull back for something more sedate. No worries if you don't have thoughts. I have thoughts. Part of that is-- OK, so I'm a big Hopkins stan, and I love how vibrant he is with his language. But at the same time, when you're in the mode of workshop or people are telling you to cull your lines a certain way, and in an effort not to embarrass myself with my eagerness towards sound, I try to pull back a little bit. But mostly I think it's about the emotional logic of a particular poem. And I like thinking of poems as music. And Jorie always gave the advice of thinking of a poem as a piece of music in terms of how you value alignments and so on. And I think of that also in terms of, I guess, the juiciness of the language to use the phrase, Alex. That there's some moments in the emotional logic of the poem where you want that sheer exuberance and ecstaticness and just want to be flowery and latinate in your verbal usage. And then other times there's just saying this is the very simple thing that I felt. There's nothing more complex to make out of it. In fact, I'm a little annoyed that I'm going towards the space of the poem to tackle this feeling because for some odd reason I'm too stubborn to commit to the simple feeling. And I think this is particularly an issue when I was writing about the kids I used to teach, because my feelings towards them are very simple. I liked the kids. I love the kids. And then I'd be like, well, why do I like them? There has to be a reason. Is it because they're so philosophically? Yeah, and they can generate thoughts. And if you're just like, no, dude, you like them. And it was OK to just make the language simple during feeling simple feelings, and make it more chaotic when I felt chaotic. I don't know if that helps at all. SHERAH BLOOR: It's really good. We have a question I feel we should answer. It's important for everyone. So Amber-- it's to all of you-- thank you all so much for sharing today. How do you make time to be creative and write and workshop your craft while having a full-time job? I'm going to listen very carefully to your answers now because I was with you during the pandemic. I don't know how you guys have managed to do so much. I'm still in the exact same position I was in. So OK, let's listen to them now. How have you managed to do this? To keep writing? JESS YUAN: I think it's a great question. And I wish there were a magical answer, but I think it's very hard. And I think everyone who struggles to build a creative practice needs to do what they need to do to make it happen. And I definitely struggled to make room for my writing for a long time. And I used to really feel bad about it, too. I think I needed to forgive myself and accept that sometimes you need to do less in order to make room for art. And often I couldn't do less. I needed to do what I needed to do to make rent or pay off debt or take care of myself. And so I think it's so important to be generous to yourself and to value the parts of creative practice that are nurturing. And I think it would be amazing if all we could do was just write all day. And I feel really privileged that that can happen sometimes with MFAs and residencies and fellowships and stuff. But the real core of what brings me, and I think many of us, continually back to poetry, I think it's something that has sustained me even in times when I really didn't have time for poetry. It was the energy, the generosity, the kindness, and the nourishment of poetry that kept me staying with it. But yeah, I think it's very hard to work and to write. I wouldn't recommend it, and yet so many of us have to do it out of necessity. But yeah, I think it's such an important question and one that I ask people all the time, too. SHERAH BLOOR: Yeah, we need to be talking about it, definitely. Isabel? ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY: So it depends what I'm doing. So when I was finishing my dissertation, I didn't find it that difficult because I was alone all the time. And I think the isolation of COVID really helped with the writing, in the sense that I just had too many feelings and nowhere to put them. But since I've been teaching, when I'm teaching it's extremely hard to write. And it's because all my emotional energy goes into talking to students, thinking about them, hearing their stories, prepping for stuff. And it's not just the time. It's the emotional, the affect of energy. I have an incredibly small reserve of energy. And so I cannot write when I'm teaching. But fortunately I teach, so I get breaks in between those things. And then usually I just have a couple of truly crazy days where I write a lot. And so I think the answer is, I have chosen a profession that has certain periods in which you can be more fertile than others. Oh, I wanted to say before we break apart that, if y'all haven't-- so Amanda Gunn's book, she was part of this workshop she workshopped with us. So I got an advance copy, and it is unbelievable. And you have to buy it, and you have to get her to sign it. And so it's called Things I Didn't Do with This Body. It comes out next month with Copper Canyon. Go buy that book. Oh. SHERAH BLOOR: I'm very, very excited about that. And definitely, I mean, the next event has to be Amanda, Darius. I mean, Laura, a lot of people. We need to get them all together. It's very important. Tawanda, writing? TAWANDA MULALU: Yeah, totally want to second what Isabel said about Amanda's book. Popped a link in the comments. Go pre-order that joint. It's spectacular. I just got my copy, too, so I'm very pumped to dig in. Writing while working. Forgive the confident answer. I'm just going to respond to something that Sherah said earlier when she said, oh, I don't know how you guys did this because we were in the pandemic together. And I think, well, actually, Sherah, you wrote a lot of things. Not just your poems but also dissertation stuff. I think this is coming to something that I think about a lot about the difference between writing and publishing. A lot of the times when you're not working, you're probably secretly writing. Either you're thinking about a poem or you're thinking about a turn of phrase. Or if you enjoy listening to rap and hip hop, you're reciting lyrics to yourself or inventing freestyles for yourself while walking or going about your day. So there's lots of secret writing that people do all the time that I think is worth respecting. Both, so you chill yourself out and don't think you have to write some epic Odyssey shit all the time, but also because you can't predict everything that's going to happen with your brain at any given moment. So enjoy the secret writing. The second thing to be more materially accurate reflect how things went with me personally, during the pandemic I was working as a third grade teacher assistant and also had a bit of money from the job that I was going to do because I got a signing bonus. So even though I was underpaid as a teacher assistant, when the day ended, I didn't have to grade stuff because I was an assistant. So I went home and for the first couple of three months, I did nothing and stared at the ceiling because I was sad. But then after that, it was like, OK, I'd like to not just be sad. I don't have to do a second job. Also, legally I couldn't do a second job for immigration reasons. So I was like, OK, fuck it. I'll write. So trying to finesse things with if your job situation, I think is one of the best bits of finding time. I recognize that's not always possible, but every once in a while you can finesse something. And then the last thing is finding organizations that understand your working situation. So Brooklyn Poets, I think is an organization that's been really important to my development as a poet as well. Outside of workshop space, they do lots of weekend workshops and Zooms. On Zoom they do a year-long mentorship program that assumes you're working full time, which is like a mini MFA thing. So organizations like that that know you have other shit going on and you're with other people who have other shit going on. So you respect each other's time and you respect each other's energy and grind. But above all, I think generally, remember that writing isn't publishing. Don't stress yourself out. I personally psyched myself out and it's not a process I'm eager to repeat. I just want to write because it makes me feel less alone. So don't ignore your secret writing. You're probably writing right now. SHERAH BLOOR: Yeah, I mean, listening as well. I mean, we're picking up all of each other's musics and images. And it's helpful. It really helps. I think Jorie would say to us at some point, she'd say just wake up an hour earlier every day. This sort of advice. I always feel guilty. I never do that. I mean, of course, you can do that, or just work 15 minutes every morning. The other thing I'd say is that for people who are in this time zone, this poetry program we're doing sometimes we do get poets to come and visit and workshop with us. And if people in the audience haven't had the chance to workshop, sure there are people who haven't, you should get in contact with Peripheries on Twitter or on Instagram. And contact us and we can get you into some workshops. And I think having that experience is very inspiring and also having a community. The other thing Jorie would say to us is-- I take solace in this, when you've been in workshop, if someone publishes a book, we've all published that book. I do feel like I was a bit involved in this, wasn't I? It can be a communal exercise. And maybe, yeah, we don't need to publish. We can also just write for our friends. And sometimes one line sent to a friend, that's also really good. But yeah, people should be in contact if they want to workshop and support writing. OK, I'm right on time, guys. So let me thank you all, and I am excited to read more of your work. And I'm sure so is the audience. And yeah, I also just love seeing you, so it was really nice to spend this time together. ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY: Thank you, Sherah. TAWANDA MULALU: Thanks, Sherah. This was dope, y'all. Take care. ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY: Thank you. JESS YUAN: Thank you. 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