Best Poet title. Their work has appeared in
The American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The Paris Review, Mizna, and elsewhere. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard University, he currently resides in Somerville, MA, where he teaches in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.
INTRODUCTION
One of the most important lessons I wish I’d learned earlier is the importance of establishing a reading practice. For me, this is arguably more important than a “writing practice,” which can be so hard to find when one is first starting and, furthermore, takes a lot of flux, risk, and experimentation to find a nice balance between discipline and sustainability. It’s easy to lose oneself to a vicious cycle of stagnation in such attempts at early writing process: pressuring oneself to produce without critically examining the writing, beating oneself up when poems don’t work out. But reading always nourishes my brain and soul, even when my writing stagnates and flails. Reading forces me to slow down and sit with nonlinearities in my creative process as a way of re-thinking not only my writing but the world around me. Reading is also communal, not only in the way that language lingers and embeds itself into my work, but in the sacred private conversations I can have with a text, even if there are countries, borders, or lifespans between the author and I. Adopting an active reading practice, that is, consciously journeying to find the books my artistry needs, and knowing where to linger and revisit versus when to read broadly, has led to many of my most impactful writing friendships and community.