Art & Abolition

Diverse Verse is a collective of poets of color who write for young readers, and this month we’re taking turns writing “love letters” to poetry. My essay went up today: “Art & Abolition.” Here’s an excerpt:

I am still surprised (and somewhat ashamed) of the way my imagination simply shut down at the possibility of a world without prisons. I have spent most of my life writing poetry, plays, novels, and picture books for young readers; I earn a living writing fantasy fiction precisely because I have the ability to dream up alternate realities. And yet instead of embracing abolition as an opportunity to create a more just world, I dismissed the idea outright. My imagination wasn’t “limitless,” as I had believed. Instead I had internalized ideas about criminality and policing that diminished my capacity to understand, envision, and experience true liberation. This was a sobering realization.

It’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) so I’m writing a poem a day, and I actually wrote this essay while I was still in Scotland. I’ve been back for just over two weeks but my time in Glasgow feels like it happened ages ago. I’m making good progress on The Ship in the Garden and hope to finish that by the end of this month. This is my year to finish all the incomplete novels that I’ve neglected for far too long. If I stand my ground and keep saying NO to fall gigs, then I should have enough time to travel some more and finish the three novels. My friend Edi suggested Samoa, but New Zealand has been on my list for a long while…and I just got an invitation from a new friend in Porto, Portugal. She lives there half the year so I’d need to go before she leaves in August. We talked for three hours this morning and then I went for a run; came home and wrote this haiku:

a cloudless blue sky

a day without urgency

time to dream and scheme

And write!