A Conversation With Poet Pamela Sneed

"Black men and women are not allowed to speak… we're spoken of."

I recently had a great conversation with Pamela Sneed about mentorship and legacy and I’m delighted to be able to share it with y’all here.

Pamela Sneed is a poet, artist, performer and teacher. Strikingly fierce at 6’2”, Pamela’s presence — her voice, her verve, her deep love — is a poem unto itself. It’s a joy to know her, but she’s lived so many lives, I feel like there’s always more to learn.

Her most recent book Funeral Diva uses both poetry and memoir to explore how Pamela came into her own as a Black Queer artist and performer during the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic when being a part of that community meant grieving precisely as one attempted to grow. The emerging years of her career came to be defined by the experience (shared by many Black Queer women at the time) of performing and presiding over the funerals of their friends, mentors and chosen brothers. As Parul Sehgal noted in her New York Times review of Funeral Diva. “It’s not just that the labor of these women has gone largely unacknowledged, it’s that their grief has counted for so little. All those beloveds Sneed names who withered, went blind or “disappeared like thousands of bits of paper,” friends who were her family as well as her education.” Funeral Diva also examines the pointed parallels between the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis and yet another pandemic which disproportionately impacts people our country alternately labels as “essential” or “marginalized.” 

In December at the Whitney Museum in New York, I had the honor of presenting Pamela with the Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award for Artists and Organizers on behalf of my fellow jurors Maria Bauman and Felli Maynard. Standing beside Pamela, being held by her as I held her myself, felt like forming a protective circle against the forces of erasure and violence so eager to diminish the work, memory and life-blood of artists and thinkers who have made art possible for so many of us. 

Pamela has been taking great, loving care of us, her legendary children, for so long. And, I believe, the urgency of her caretaking is deeply informed by her first-hand interactions with Black Queer luminaries we have lost. She didn’t just study Audre Lorde and Pat Parker’s poetry and essays; Pamela, as a young emerging artist herself, was in the room with them. 

You will notice that our conversation — which took place over Zoom — becomes a kind of archive itself, a litany of Black Queer artists whose names should be treasured and remembered. I hope you will familiarize yourself with their legacies too. Maybe remembrance is also a kind of caretaking.

Saeed Jones:

One of the joys of reading your memoir Funeral Diva is that, because the book brings forth memories of your early years as a poet in New York City in the late 70s and 80s, literary lions like Audre Lorde, for example, are a part of that scene too.

Pamela Sneed:

I was like a baby when she was alive. And I would go to everything that she did and I’d just be crying.

Saeed:

[laughs] I mean, I’m sure I would’ve been too.

Pamela:

I did a talk a couple of years back and the audience was all young people who, well it seemed like, they all had kind of just discovered the archive. They were really so excited about Audre. And they were so excited about artists and writers they were learning about from the Other Countries Collective. But on the panel, I was talking about actually knowing Audre and people in the audience were just gasping. They were like, "Wow, you actually knew her." And so, I think hearing from me, talking about her like a real person I knew, it added a bit of a reality to things for the young people in the room.

And I mean, it's interesting because now I do have a lot of students who are studying the archive and they're talking about all these people, like Audre, like writers from Other Countries, as if they are gods and goddesses, which they are. But having a sense of knowing them and then also telling them that some people are still alive is important too. You know what I mean?

Saeed:

Like, yes, we must honor and remember who we’ve lost but Black Queer culture isn’t past tense. 

Pamela:

There are lots of guys from Other Countries who are still alive. And so, one of the things, just even in my work when I curate things and like art stuff, I always try to include work from a living black man too. Do you know what I mean? Because I think black men and women are not allowed to speak… we're spoken of, you know, in this token kind of way. But I did this show recently and I asked one of the guys, Terrence Taylor, from Other Countries to basically speak because I was like, "It's really important that there's a living black man here."

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Saeed:

And for me, that’s the thing, it’s not all desolation and loss and erasure. You made it and you’re still making art and making community and inspiring us to keep making too. There’s so much to who you are to me, to us, really. That’s why I got so emotional presenting you with that award in December. It was part of a bigger whole. It was a first step. [laughs] Like,  you start with the Pamela Sneed Award for this, the Pamela Sneed Award for that. And then it's the Pamela Sneed Endowed Chair? And then one day, poetry students will be walking into the Pamela Sneed Center for the Arts. [we both laugh]

Pamela:

Speak on it. Speak it.

Saeed:

I got plans!

Pamela:

It's really beautiful because it's just so like... I always teach Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and I feel like invisibility is such a difficult thing. I mean, Audre talks about it, that there's this duality that we're rendered invisible . And that we're afraid of visibility but that's the thing that we most want. You what I mean? So we're always treading that line of dying for this visibility — to be seen, to be known — and then on the other hand, we're truly seen it's very difficult when you are visible.

Saeed:

And, as bell hooks often pointed out, there is a gift of being able to be on the margins and being able to observe, right?

Pamela:

Yeah. I mean, if you can survive. I don't want to romanticize it. It’s really difficult, I think, to walk your own path. I mean, Alice Walker says, "Be nobody's darling." And I mean, I've definitely, I've chosen that and it’s a difficult walk. It's a really difficult walk. But I suppose that that is my path and I embrace it and I have more and more students who appreciate that.

Saeed:

Who were some of your mentors?

Pamela:

Well, Sekou Sundiata. I took my first poetry class at the New School in the late 80s and I was really instrumental, honestly. It was seminar or college and there were probably like 30 students altogether. And they had never had a Black teacher and so I was part of radicalizing that institution. And finally, we brought Sekou. He was very much in the tradition of Amiri Baraka, sort of like The Last Poets. And he had a band. And I mean, he was just like the hippest thing.

And Sekou stayed at the New School up until his death. But he was my first poetry teacher. And then interestingly enough, I was asked to teach a course at The New School this year. And I went and, I mean, it's really historic that I'm returning to the university where I was mentored. And so now they're talking about naming a writing award after me. And actually, which is really funny, it was, I think, about a week ago they had approached me about trying to name this award after me. And I just thought, "Oh my God, that is so historic."

Saeed:

I love that so much! 

Pamela:

And I was also mentored by Jane Lazarre, a white woman married to a black man. She was my fiction teacher. But also Susan Batson, who's acting coach to the stars now. A fierce little black woman. She's like, pint sized, looks like Diana Ross. And I mean, she coached Lady Gaga and Mary J. Blige. And I could say a lot of things about Susan. I think she's part psychic, part shaman and part acting coach. I don't know. She's the first person that I met like 20 years ago, 30 years ago and she saw me. But I also identify with her because I have that kind of vision. Do you know what I mean? So there's this kind of shamanistic, seer kind of thing. So it's not just speaking from the discipline, it's speaking from... I don't know. Maybe an ancestral realm. Working with Susan, I think that that really changed my life because that was... She's all about telling the truth. And so in a way, her way of truth telling — just seeing and encouraging people to do the work — I've been very influenced by her as well.

So I think all of these pioneering women of color. And then, as a young artist, I also came up with all of these black queer men, and we were friends and we were peers and we nurtured each other. And I really see that as I always call it as kin to the Harlem Renaissance. In the late 80s, early 90s, in New York, you had all of these black queer people kind of brought on by Audre Lorde and James Baldwin. And stepping into a new identity as queer black poets and all that stuff. And coming away from the suburbs and all these towns to converge on Manhattan in the late 80s early 90s, to make this new identity and then to be decimated by AIDS and cancer. So you had like Audre dying of cancer, June Jordan died of cancer, Pat Parker died of cancer. And then you had Essex Hemphill and Donald Woods and Marlon Riggs and Bert Hunter and... You know what I'm saying? So it was just... To be a young person, these were all my mentors.

Saeed:

That’s so much loss to experience at any point in one’s life, but especially as a young person. That’s so difficult. And you've mentioned the Other Countries Collective. Can you talk a bit more about them? 

Pamela:

Other Countries was a black queer collective. I forget when they actually started, but they were like a writing collective. They had meetings at the Center on 13th st in Manhattan. A group of black queer men came together to kind of write and have readings and support each other. And I met some of them, because I was working at Hetrick-Martin right after I graduated. And Donald Woods, who was a really good friend of mine, basically studied with Audre at Hunter College. And I mean, they were stars. And I remember going out of my way to make it to an event and I saw all of them reading. I saw Donald reading and I was like, "Oh my God. So beautiful." And I don't know. I mean, I chased them around.

Saeed:

I love that so much. I smile every time I think about baby Pamela running around New York, going from event to event. [giggles] Okay, one more question. Would you mind talking about someone you’ve mentored recently? What’s it been like?

Pamela:

Well I really think... I mean, one of... I mentored Tommy Pico. And I'm really proud of Tommy because he's head writer for the television show Reservation Dogs. And I had that vision when I saw his application for the Queer Art Mentorship fellowship program. I was like, "Yeah." And I mean, he was just trying to make zines. And I was like, "No, you could be a great American writer. Your work is important." And Tommy was like, "What? What is she talking about?" But I knew. And so it’s been really exciting to see that happen.