by Lena Crown
This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts. Robert Frost allegedly said he was not a teacher but an “awakener.” On every episode of this podcast, host Lena Crown speaks with writers, artists, critics, and scholars across generations who have awakened something for one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence. Website: awakenerspodcast.com
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March 4, 2025
On this special bonus episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with writer Tiana Clark about the person who first told her she was a poet: her late mentor and high school teacher, Mr. Bill Brown. Tiana was a rebellious teenager. “They’re talking about you in the teacher’s lounge,” Mr. Brown warned her once. But instead of punishing Tiana for acting out, Mr. Brown gifted her the poetry of Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee, and Sharon Olds, writers whose work broke all the rules Tiana had learned in school. He continued to support Tiana for the next twenty years, cheering her on through her MFA applications, her chapbook publication, and the publication of her first book. In the first half of the episode, we discuss Mr. Brown’s legacy in Tiana’s poetry, pedagogy, and attention to the natural world (since he could name every tree on their walks around the neighborhood). Later on, Tiana reads “Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy” from her new collection Scorched Earth, a poem that illuminates the darker history behind the pedestrian greenway where Tiana walked every day in the pandemic, and where she saw Mr. Brown for the last time. We talk about the form of the sestina and what it means to “break” it or “fail” at it. We also cover Tiana’s revised future as a historian, the politics of traveling (and writing about travel) as a Black woman, and the elegy form as an attempt to resurrect those we’ve lost. Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth; I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; and Equilibrium, which won the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and Tennessee State University, where she studied Africana and women’s studies. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Find out more at TianaClark.com. This episode marks the end of Season 1, but stay tuned in summer for Season 2! Subscribe and connect with us on our website for updates: awakenerspodcast.com. More Tiana: https://www.tianaclark.com/ Order Scorched Earth, out March 4, 2025: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Scorched-Earth/Tiana-Clark/9781668052075 Definition of pastoral: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/pastoral Definition of sestina: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/sestina Definition of elegy: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/elegy Definition of ekphrasis: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/ekphrasis Mentioned in the episode: Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee, Ross Gay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Phillis Wheatley, Rick Barot, Maggie Nelson
February 18, 2025
On this episode of Awakeners, Lena chats with writers T Bambrick and Jane Miller, who were connected by some fellow poets in Tucson when T found themselves at a crossroads in their writing. Jane had just retired from teaching (for the first time), but they began to meet regularly over brunch to talk about—well, everything. We discuss the advice from Jane that helped T write their first book, a searing poetry collection about working a cleanup crew around a dam in Washington. We talk about moments of crisis in artmaking, how to write about harmful experiences without making yourself sad, and when and why we might want to write “small” or take up more space on the page. In the second half of the episode, T reads aloud a poem from their book Intimacies, Received inspired by a line from one of Jane’s poems, and Jane shares a poem about artmaking from Paper Banners. Bonus: we follow T down a research rabbit hole about the violent political history of skunks. T says: “Jane told me, Say somebody hit you with a wooden spoon. You might write a book about spoons or wood. You can work your way around the site of the most intense pain, finding something to dive into and obsess over.” Jane Miller has written twelve poetry books, most recently Paper Banners and Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions, and two collections of essays, Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel and From the Valley of Bronze Camels: A Primer, Some Lectures, & A Boondoggle on Poetry. She is the recipient of a Wallace Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Western States Book Award, and the Audre Lorde Prize in Poetry. Jane has taught in several MFA programs, including The University of Arizona, The Michener Center for Writers, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. T Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press 2022), and Vantage (American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award 2019). Their work can be found in the New Yorker, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and is a Dornsife Fellow in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Southern California. Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com. More T: https://www.taneumbambrick.com/ More Jane: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/authors/jane-miller/ Mentioned in the episode: T Bambrick’s poem “Traveling”: https://missourireview.com/taneum-bambrick-traveling/ C.D. Wright Viet Thanh Nguyen
February 4, 2025
On this episode of Awakeners, Lena gets temporarily inducted into a writing group called the Firefeet by writers Emily Alford, Charlie Beckerman, CJ Hauser and Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, who have been keeping their “feet to the fire”—in other words, keeping weekly goal-setting and accountability email threads—for the past ten years. The four connected through the graduate programs in creative writing at Florida State University, and they’ve supported one another through novel drafting, book publication, family struggles, job changes, and more over the course of a decade. We discuss how the Firefeet came together, what makes them good readers of one another’s work, the “signature moves” that characterize each of their writing, and what they’ve learned about writing group best practices. In the second half of the episode, we define four key terms in Firefeet lingo, and we go around the circle and perform one of the Firefeet's weekly check-ins. We also celebrate Olivia, whose week is extra special: the publication of this podcast episode coincides with the pub date for Mutual Interest, her new queer historical novel about a love triangle in Gilded-Age New York. Emily Alford is a writer living in New Orleans. A former staff writer at Jezebel, her work has also appeared in Publishers Weekly, Iron Horse, Gawker, and elsewhere. She teaches at Tulane and is hard at work on a noir novel. You can find pictures of her 15-year-old cocker spaniel on Instagram (@emilyalicealford) and rants at the TV on Bluesky (@alfordalice). Charlie Beckerman is a writer who claims both San Francisco and New York as his hometown. His fiction has appeared in Glassworks and The Quail Bell Review, and his memoir podcast, Serial Dater, is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. He has written other nonfiction for Greatist, Thrillist, and worked as a political writer for Bustle during the 2016 Presidential Election. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to the United Kingdom, and he is working on his PhD in Fiction at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently seeking representation for his queer historical fiction novel set in London during the Second World War. He is @chozzles everywhere on social media, and you can find more information at www.charliebeckerman.com. CJ Hauser is a genderqueer and genrequeer writer who teaches at Colgate University. They are the author of The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays and Family of Origin: A Novel. You can find them trying to keep their chin up and disseminating dog pictures on substack @dopaminedog. Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (@owolfgangsmith) is the author of Mutual Interest (out Feb 4, 2025 from Bloomsbury) and Glassworks, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with her partner. More at https://www.awakenerspodcast.com/.
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