Winners Chosen for VS' Roll Call: A Black Poetry Radio Hour

We asked, you answered, and now we have the winning entries for VS' Roll Call: A Black Poetry Radio Hour,  the VS podcast miniseries spotlighting urgent and emergent conversations in contemporary poetry! This summer, Roll Call will feature six episodes dedicated to the past, present, and future of Black poetry.

“It was humbling, inspiring, and restoring to spend time amongst such rich Black thought, Black genius, and Black love," said VS cohost Danez Smith.  “These projects are full of life, heart, and fierce intellect. I am so elated to hear what comes on these audio dreams as these poets and scholars now turn their energies towards bringing them to life. I hope you will join in celebrating the winning podcasts and all the amazing finalists!”

The Winners

Gabrielle Civil
Civil (she/her) is a Black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer; she curated and hosted Black Motion Pictures, a Zoom interview series with radical Black creatives, and is a Rema Hort Mann LA Emerging Artist. In her episode, Civil will grapple with the slippery, urgent nature of Black time, what she calls “the déjà vu.” She will talk to fellow Black poets about Black myth and nostalgia, embodying time in their work, building time capsules, and navigating perpetual anti-Black violence. This episode offers sonic experiments, spotlight readings, and intimate chats to bring the déjà vu alive.

Ajanae Dawkins, Maurisa Li-A-Ping, and Brittany Rogers
Dawkins (she/her), Li-A-Ping (she/her), and Rogers (she/her) will produce an episode on radical literary friendship, including a roundtable discussion with guests and a conversation about the friendships literary greats that guide their practices—such as Pat Parker and Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison and Sonia Sanchez.

Dawkins has published in BreakBeat Poets: Black Girl Magic Edition, For Harriet, The Offing, Winter Tangerine, and Tinderbox Poetry, among others;  Li-A-Ping is a writer and educator whose current and  publications include Puerto del Sol, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood: The Lauryn Hill Reader, and About Campus, and Obsidian; Rogers is a poet, mother, educator, and coeditor-in-chief at Muzzle Magazine, as well as a fellow of VONA/ Voices, The Watering Hole, the Poetry Incubator, and Pink Door Writing Retreat.

Raina J. León, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, and Jasminne Mendez
In their episode, these the Afro-Latinx writers will highlight and discuss the work of individuals such as Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Willie Perdomo, and Aracelis Girmay with the following questions in mind: What did Black/Afro-Latinx poetics look like prior to Latinidad? How does Latinidad show up in the work and will we begin to reject notions of a monolithic Latinidad in favor of embracing our distinct nationalities instead? How will Black American culture and poetics continue to influence our work and what is the benefit of highlighting our diasporic differences?

León (she/her) is a Black and Afro-Boricua Philadelphian who is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, and Macondo; Holnes (he/him) is the author of STEPMOTHERLAND and Migrant Psalms, winners of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize and the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize, respectively; Mendez (she/her) is a Dominican-American poet, educator, playwright and award-winning author of multiple books, including Machete, forthcoming from Noemi Press.

Kopano Maroga and Maneo Refiloe Mohale
Maroga (they/them) and Mohale (they/them) will take audiences through a discussion of Black queer poetry as it relates to South African localities. They will share pieces from multi-disciplinary artists that they deem vital for any conversation on Black queer poetics from a South African position, beginning to chart a cartography of their poetic lineages across disciplines, forms, and the colonial inheritance of the nation state.

Maroga is a performance artist, writer, cultural worker, and cofounding director of the arts organization ANY BODY ZINE. Their debut collection Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations was released in 2020 through uHlanga Press. Mohale is a South African editor, feminist writer, and poet who has has served as a contributing editor for The New York Times and i-D, Their debut collection, Everything is a Deathly Flower, was published with uHlanga Press in 2019.

Joshua Moore, Colleen Phelps, and WPLN
This episode will be a one-hour dramatic production tracking the evolution and influence of the Fisk Jubilee Singers over the past 150 years, focusing on three landmark performances: their inaugural tour, their concert in Queen Victoria’s court, and their 2007 “A Sacred Journey” concert at Elmina Castle in Ghana. The narrative will be interspersed with poems written by Black Nashville/Fisk-affiliated poets in response to Jubilee Singers’ archival materials.

Joshua Moore (he/him) is a Nashville poet, the host and producer for Nashville Public Radio’s Versify podcast, and the lead writer/producer of Seizing Freedom from VPM and Stitcher, he holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University; musician Colleen Phelps hosts and produces the podcast Classically Speaking from Nashville Public Radio and is the Music Director and Midday Host at WUOL Classical Louisville.

Keith S. Wilson
Wilson (he/him) is a game designer, Affrilachian Poet, Cave Canem fellow, and author of Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love; he is a current Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, and a Kenyon Review Fellowship. Wilson will take audiences through a couple of segments of poets elucidating the unique possibilities of visual poetics. Through these conversations, he aims to get folks thinking about how contemporary Black poets are experimenting outside of the performance and sound space

With guidance from Danez Smith and Still Processing cohost Jenna Wortham, these incredible thinkers and makers will record and produce their episodes for all to enjoy. Roll Call rolls out Summer 2021.

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—The VS Team