I’m overjoyed to introduce y’all to a new series for the newsletter that I’ve been working on behind-the-scenes for a little while. Since the people we live, struggle and grow alongside are a part of our creative process, the Werk Session series introduces you to the brilliant artists, writers and thinkers who deeply color my life and my work. And we’ll be going on an artistic journey together!
Each guest will be featured in three sessions that take us all the way through a real-time creative process. Our first guest is poet Angel Nafis. Aside from the fact that Angel is inherently fly and thus brings shine to any process, she herself inspired and helped me develop this project after I mentioned to her that I wanted a find a way to include more of my people in the newsletter. She listened, asked questions, shared ideas she’s developed with her partner Shira Erlichman and together, we created a plan for this shared process.
Here’s a bit about Angel herself:
A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan and living legend of Brooklyn, New York, Angel is the author of the book BlackGirl Mansion. In 2016, she was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. In 2017, she was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, BuzzFeed Reader and elsewhere.
Read her poem “Angel Nafis” here.
Read her poem “Ghazal for Becoming Your Own Country” here.
So what is the Werk Session? It’s a little experiment where my guests and I will create art together and have a dialogue about the inspiration and process — and you get to watch the whole process play out! It’ll all happen in three parts:
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