I was a late bloomer when it comes to gay sex. If you’re comfortable with it, can you recount this latter narrative? References to domestic violence and an abusive father appear in your poems, as do same-sex rape and HIV, all of which are autobiographical. Since the pandemic, we talk now more than we ever did even when I lived there. I want to make sure they’re staying in the house! It’s interesting how things change. I want to be there-because they’re older and I don’t trust them. If I go to my mom and dad’s house and things get crazy, I can get in a car and leave.īut I have to say, one thing about the pandemic is, I’ve felt I should be living closer to my mom and dad. I think other people have a hard time coming out, and part of the reason is that they still have dependency with their family. We have a relationship based on the fact that I did everything in my power to be as independent as possible. How did they respond to your coming out as gay and HIV positive? My dad, he’s the kind of guy who thinks if I write about him, he should get a cut of the money. Have they changed their attitudes now that you’ve got a Pulitzer? Scenes from POZ’s Zoom interview with Jericho Brown I don’t think that’s special to my parents. And they were mean! Which I think parents were, by the way. They loved us, and education was important to them. My parents and grandparents were amazing, some of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met. But there was also a lot of stuff that’s traditional that I’d like to get rid of. I sang in choir growing up because we had to be active in the church. There were always gatherings where people were eating food that was very spicy. It was very Louisiana in that my parents thought it was important that my sister and I know how to play spades. I’m originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, a blue-collar, violent, religious home. But where did you grow up, and how would you describe it? You now live in Atlanta, where you’re a professor at Emory University and the director of its creative writing program. We are not making this up!Īnd yes, it is a tradition in Black families to talk to your sons and daughters about how to deal with the police in certain ways, which really have to do with: Be prepared to be humiliated, and take the humiliation so that you might be able to live. I don’t like seeing generation after generation after generation of Black people being called a liar over how we are treated by the police. They’re not! So I do believe in progress. I’m not one of these people who think things are just like they were in 1964. But I am optimistic about the resistance people have to that. Are you optimistic about the future?Īm I optimistic about a change in the way police treat Black people? I don’t think so. So obviously, people think, Oh, this book is about that summer. It turns out to be the saddest thing and the most fortuitous thing Pulitzer was announced was the murder of George Floyd. But I really just wrote the poems of my heart. I wrote a book, yes, that has a lot to do with the Trump era if you think of the Trump era, and that has a lot to do with police if you think about police, or trees if you think about trees. It takes a long time to write a poem-I’d give a poem four years on average-and many of my poems we think call out to the current moment were written long before the current moment. Things that have been written a very long time ago make an impact now because the moment has been waiting for that. So many people have had COVID and so many people have died that I think it might change our understanding of health disparities among communities. Something you write can change over time given other people’s circumstances. The interesting thing the COVID pandemic has done for my work is, it has broadened the facts of those references, and, I think, it has changed our judgment about them. References to things like “a virus” or “the virus” come up in my work a great deal. So yeah, it does come up but because I bring it up. But when I’m talking about the poems, it’s impossible not to talk about the thread of disease or the thread of queerness. It comes up when queer people interview me. When you were doing press for The Tradition and the Pulitzer, did people bring up the HIV or same-sex elements in your work? You won the Pulitzer Prize last May, right as COVID-19 struck and racial tensions roiled the nation.
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