For Editors Ana-Maurine Lara and drea brown, ‘Teaching Black’ Is a Love Letter

Ruth Joffre interviews Ana-Maurine Lara and drea brown about their anthology ‘Teaching Black,’ the process of putting the book together, and what it means to be in conversation with authors included in its pages.

In my years as a teacher, I’ve heard many instructors ask how to talk about racism, how to teach work by writers of color, and how to reach students of color—and that has only increased since the summer of 2020. Until recently, very few published works touched on these subjects as they applied to classrooms devoted to creative writing and the study of writing craft. Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature is a recent addition to that still too-short list. Published in December 2021, the book collects both original and previously published works on pedagogy and the teaching of Black literature at all levels of education.

In many ways, you can think of Teaching Black as the craft of teaching the craft of Black writers: How to understand Black literature and the cultural context from which it stems. Why the craft choices Black writers make are important. What Black literature is, what it has been, what it will continue to be. All the questions a teacher might have, answered by Black writers writing about Black writers. It is an invaluable teaching resource.

At the end of December, I was fortunate enough to virtually meet with editors Ana-Maurine Lara and drea brown to discuss the inspiration behind Teaching Black, the process of putting the book together, and what it means to be in conversation with authors included in its pages—as well as with the many readers to come.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

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Ruth Joffre: I love hearing about the genesis of projects, so I’ll start by asking what the initial spark of this book was. How did the two of you come together to bring this vision into the world?

drea brown: It was 2017. I was living in Baltimore at the time. Ana was in town for the National Women’s Studies Association’s fortieth conference and stayed with me. It was the morning after one of the conference days, and we were drinking coffee and talking, and she was looking at my bookshelf—at all these different craft books and poetry collections—and said, “drea, where are all the books on Black literature? On teaching Black literature? On teaching Black creative writing?” I distinctly remember sitting there for a moment and looking at her and saying, “Ana, are we about to do a book? I think so, friend. I think so.”

Ana-Maurine Lara: It was like that, yes. It started when I looked at drea’s amazing shelves, and we were looking at the books on craft. I forget the one I pulled out, but I was like, “Okay, this is nice and all, but where are the books on teaching Black literature? Why aren’t any of these books using Black literature as a way to teach form or to teach craft?” And we started talking: “What is out there?” And immediately, you know, it was Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. It was June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. These were the first things that came to mind. And then Skip Gates’s The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. But we didn’t know of anything else out there. So we looked at each other and were like, “I guess we’re doing this.” And here we are.

db: Even when we did research and found other collections on craft, we weren’t able to find the specific intersection of books on craft or books on teaching Black literature that were written by Black folks who happened to be creative writers.

AML: Then we decided to focus on teaching. We did that because we already knew, for example, that Terrance Hayes and Elizabeth Alexander had books on form, as did Nikki Giovanni. There are people who have books on form itself, and Black innovations in form. But we were really seriously thinking about how to get a tool in the hands of teachers who want to engage Black literature, or maybe just want to get a broader context or perspective on how to do that.

db: And folks who are teaching Black literature and need to see something that might reflect their experiences or influence them as they are in the front of the classroom too.

RJ: I first heard about this book from poet Anastacia-Reneé, who gave a talk about anti-racist pedagogy for Hugo House instructors in summer of 2020, and they mentioned that their thinking on this subject would be collected in a book. That was probably a year and a quarter before the book’s publication, which, given publication timelines, was probably already pretty deep into the process of putting this book together. Can you talk about the process and timeline of putting this book together?

AML: For anyone interested in doing an edited collection, it is definitely a process. For me and drea, it was important for love to be at the center of this. Basically, for our friendship to be at the center, and our respect and admiration for each other, but also for the people that we were inviting to take part. I realized—in talking to you about perusing drea’s bookshelves—that we’re both from a generation where we go to libraries or to friends’ houses and look at shelves and find books that way. And that may not necessarily be the experience that other people have, but that was a really critical part of the process of getting this collection together: imagining the perusal of a shelf and the physicality of the book in that space.

So the first part was imagining the book. Then we were really talking about, “Do we focus on the craft of Black poetry and Black literature?” And we felt like that was too big, possibly, and there were some good books already addressing that. And so we did that market research piece where we looked at what already exists. What’s out there? What has been published? That’s how we came across some incredible collections from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Addison Gayle Jr.’s collection Black Poets in America is coming to mind. Toni Cade Bambara’s review essay of Black theater in 1972. I mean, [there’s] just a mind-blowing bibliography of Black theater included in that review.

After the market research process, we came back to each other and sat down and started thinking about all the people that we know. We were just like, “Who do you know? Who can you call and invite to be part of this process?” We were really clear that we didn’t want it to be an open call, because we needed that friendship, that love component and the care of that component, to be at the center. So we reached out to about seventy people we knew. Some people were busy or had too much on their plate, so we ended up with forty to forty-five people saying yes. Out of that, thirty people actually submitted; then, through the editing process, we came to the twenty-seven solicited pieces. That doesn’t include the reprints.

What personally blew my mind was that so many of the people we reached out to wrote original essays for this collection! I was not expecting that. It was really moving and very powerful that people would respond to the call we gave them by writing original work.

We also wanted to include literary ancestors, so we went through the process of learning: How do we work with estates? How do we get these reprints? What are the legal parameters of reprinting previously published work? And that was a whole education in and of itself.

Then, when people got their work in, we just read it, lay down, read some more, lay down some more. Then came the process of putting something together and approaching publishers.

db: I just want to add that the love component also factored into reprints. Like, who do you love in this way? Who do you need to see? It’s how we came to Toni Morrison, how we picked June Jordan’s “Difficult Miracle.” We also learned about people as well, like Sarah Fabio. I was not that familiar with Sarah Fabio’s work until we came across her in one of the anthologies, and it was like, “Well, we gotta bring her into the reprints. Okay. Who do we contact now?” That was such a rich experience, learning the mechanics of how to reach out to the estates. How do you work with people? What’s that kind of relationship like? You have to think about the care and the love of holding someone else’s work in that way and doing the work to get their work made visible to other folks who may not be familiar with it, or to folks who haven’t looked at those words in a long time.

AML: The love-and-care piece is really central because drea and I became de facto advocates. For instance, in the review process. There’s always reviewer one and reviewer two, and there’s this joke that reviewer one is like, “This is lovely; we love it,” and reviewer two is like, “This is everything that’s wrong with this piece.” They’re trying to make work stronger, but we realized quickly that, because people just from the baseline often don’t understand Black life and Black ways of being in the world, we actually had to explain those experiences in the process of putting this [book] together. We had to actually make that visible and legible to the editors, to the publishers, and to the readers. Luckily, they were amenable and open to it, but that’s not always the case. I’ve had pieces in other collections where the editors—Black editors working with white presses (most presses are white, especially mainstream presses, academic presses, and trade presses)—didn’t always know how to advocate or see their role as an advocacy role. But we were really clear. We need to keep this formatting just as it is. You know? We have to insist that this work lives in the way that it lives.

db: Yeah, we were pushing for the formatting of things, pushing for the language. This person spells Black with this capital B, and we’re gonna keep Black with a capital B—or with a lowercase b. Or, “This word is meant to be spelled this way.” This tilde is on purpose, to mirror the ocean. There were several ways in which we found ourselves advocating. I will say, since this was my first experience putting together a collection like this, I was learning a lot about the process and ways to speak up. At the beginning, I didn’t know I would have to.

RJ: When I was reading, I was reminded of the book Sister Love, the letters of Pat Parker and Audre Lorde. In that book, as the two incredible queer Black writers are talking back and forth, this phrase emerges: “one long conversation.” How their letters and bibliographies all connected to the greater rivers of Black literatures and queer literatures and were not isolated. I had that same feeling when reading Teaching Black, where the book had this intertextual layer of pieces speaking to each other, writers being included early on and then quoted later in other people’s essays. When you were putting together the book, did you think of it in this way, as one long conversation? How did you conceptualize it?

db: After we gathered all the pieces, we thought, What are some of the threads we are getting from all of these pieces? And then, too, we were thinking about who’s afraid of Blackness, who is in conversation with it—which I think is a big part of what was going on in our process. We asked ourselves: What are the conversations that are happening between both reprints and original works that are going into the collection? How do they speak to this larger idea? If you read Rita Dove’s “Who’s Afraid of Poetry,” where can you go next? Whether you read the pieces in the order that they are printed or if you skip around in that section, you will always be a part of that kind of ongoing conversation. Regardless of the time periods. Regardless of what section you’re about to jump into reading.

AML: I was thinking about something completely related and unrelated. I was thinking about James Baldwin’s work—how his estate was being reorganized and how we couldn’t include his work because of it. How a part of the conversation for us as editors became, “Okay, girl, what you doing to organize your estate? What are you doing to ensure that your work lives beyond you?” For instance, with Sarah Fabio’s work. Luckily, I found her daughter, and we could get permission to reprint her work. Sonia Sanchez and Susan Kelly are another example. Like, we barely found Susan.

The pieces are definitely having conversations with this longer trajectory of Black intervention in the process of craft and teaching. And there’s also a conversation happening between the reality of our lives and who gets to shepherd and steward our work over time—and how we make sure that people don’t disappear from the story or the record.

It reminds me of Alice Walker reencountering Zora Neale Hurston and how transformational that reencounter with her material was. Death and disappearance then ends up transforming the ways in which we understand the history of Black literature and ethnography. Completely transformed so many people now, for two generations.

The pieces in the book are love letters to the future, to future teachers. They’re love letters to the teachers who are standing in front of classrooms trying to do this work. And they’re love letters to our histories, our memories. To all of the ground that was laid down for us.

The pieces in the book are love letters to the future, to future teachers.

db: I’m so glad you said that, because it makes me think about how much of this work is about community and the collective. It’s also about those teachers who may not have ever been in front of formal classrooms, as well, and the lessons that we got from them in terms of how to hold a conversation. How to stand up for yourself or how to resist, in some ways. When you mentioned Zora, I was thinking about all these conversations Alice Walker had to have to get what she wanted from, like, the people at the airport, to the particular kind of conversation she has to hold with neighbors [or with] people at the cemetery. It brings me back to this notion of the root of the collection being love and those love letters for teachers and community, as well. So much of this would not happen without all of these different kinds of conversations, expected and otherwise.

AML: I wanted to add to that the call-and-response was actually one of the first forms that we incorporated, right? So what you’re picking up on, too, is that the pieces are also trying to do that. They’re also trying to call and enable a response—or to then generate a new call.

RJ: Structurally, this book is broken up into four sections (“The Roux,” “What Is Black? Who’s Afraid?,” “Bearing Witness,” and “Into the Cypher”), each of them with their own organizing principle or logic. Can you talk about how you came to define the sections and how you intended these to work for the reader?

AML: I think we were just drawing from cultural forms. The cypher is something that’s very familiar, because of hip-hop and how we think historically about Black music and the ways in which jazz or Latin guaguancó or samba are about producing this—again—call and response, but also this conversation that draws people into new possibilities about life. “Into the Cypher” was, like, the most immediate cultural lexicon or shorthand we had, I think because of the generational piece, but also the scope piece.

And then “The Roux.” I mean, both of us are cooks. So we were like, “Well, you can’t have the stew without the roux, you can’t have the gumbo without the roux, you can’t have all the pieces come together without the roux.”

db: All of this comes from cultural memory, cultural productions as ways of being. Bearing witness, telling stories, but also, you know, listening, speaking, paying attention, and community. Even the provocations, those pieces between the sections, brought out shouting or sighing or just laughter that we couldn’t quite put words to or easily tag a name on elsewhere.

AML: I’ll just speak for me here, but it was a very musical process, so the provocations between the sections are the breaks for me, because they’re the solo acts, the break. Pieces reimagining what’s happening as you’re going through. In that sense, I felt like we were like, “Well, what’s the literary equivalent of a break?” It’s the provocation: getting people to stop and engage and then come back to the world in a new way, or to their own creativity in a different way. That was made possible by the quality of the work we were given.

RJ: You include a number of kinds of writing in this book: poems, personal essays, academic essays, hybrid pieces, and more. For me, the experience of reading these different pieces in one book was like a kaleidoscope or a gem, where you get multiple facets and views of the same or similar topics, and that enhances your understanding of each piece in succession. When you were editing the book, why did you choose to include all different genres, and how did you select individual pieces?

db: It was important for us that people just showed up as they are and as who they are. We didn’t give anyone guidelines in terms of having to write in this particular way or in this particular style. We gave the call and people responded organically in those forms, which speaks to the capaciousness of Blackness. To talk about Black life in literature is to show up in all these different ways, to be kind of boundaryless, you know? I don’t recall trying to say, “Oh, we have to have this number of essays here,” or “This person is great at writing particular scholarly pieces.” It was more like, “What a beautiful piece. Oh, look, so and so submitted a poem that seems to be in conversation with what John Keene is doing.” And I think that’s part of what makes the book so beautiful, you know? No bias included. Just the many ways that you can read through it, and the many ways you can read. That it disrupts expectation and also seems, in many ways, to be a lot of what might be needed at the time, regardless of the form.

AML: All of what drea said. We were intentional about disrupting homogenizing narratives of Blackness. Our own experiences of Blackness are incredibly heterogeneous. One of the gifts of Black life is that heterogeneity, and that the minute we try to homogenize it, we’re actually acting in very colonial and white supremacist ways, because colonialism and white supremacy seek to create a singular narrative. We often talked about the danger of a single story: We wanted to avoid that at all costs. That’s part of what we’re talking about when we say we were de facto advocates, because we had to make it clear that we weren’t including just thirty essays. We were including visual art as an essay too.

We were intentional about disrupting homogenizing narratives of Blackness.

The one area where we did establish significant guidelines was in numbers: page count, word count, things like that. We engaged directly with each author and gave them feedback to help folks bring out the center of their work. In some cases, there was a little copyediting or line editing that had to happen.

How amazing would it be if we enabled this variety of form in our classrooms, in our journals, in our literary journals, in our collected works, in our monographs; how incredible would it be if we approached the world from the starting point of allowing for that freedom, for people to express themselves as they see fit to do so, and to not have those boundaries. I want to point out that this does not mean that people aren’t attending to craft in their writing. That’s where sometimes there’s confusion around what Black literature is. There’s this idea that if you break form or if you don’t follow the particular rules set up by mainstream history and mainstream literature, you’re not attentive to craft. That’s a mistake. That’s a misunderstanding.

RJ: Teaching Black was published a little over a year ago, in December 2021. What has your experience of publishing it been? What has it meant to you to have this conversation expand beyond the pages?

AML: I can say that we’re taking this very gently. We haven’t been super aggressive about getting ourselves everywhere, because neither drea nor I have that kind of time. Marketing and the business of writing is extremely time-consuming. So we made a decision to be gentle with ourselves and with the work and with the people we’re working with on this.

We had a lovely, lovely presentation of the book at AWP. A hundred and fifty people came to our virtual panel. That was awesome. We had a virtual book-release party (because we’re also doing this right in the midst of world transformation). We’ve done a few presentations at universities with some of our authors that have been incredibly humbling and powerful. And I think we’re taking it slowly. We have another reading at my institution in the spring.

The way that I approach publishing personally is that I believe that each book has its own ashay. It has its own life force, and it’s going to get into the hands of the people that it needs to reach. It will travel in ways we can’t even imagine. That was a lesson I learned with the publication of my first novel, which is now talked about in ways I couldn’t have predicted. When it first came out, I was such a nervous first author, like, “Oh my God, how’s it gonna do in the market?” and all this stuff. Sixteen years into my work as an author, I’m just like, it’ll get to who it needs to get to. We have some information online, and we bring it to our institutions, and we encourage people to put it out there, and it has its own ashay.

db: Amen to all that. Gentleness has felt really good. It allows both of us to step into each event for what it is. We did an event at Hugo House, then something at my institution, and then Ana’s, and that just felt like a beautiful ushering in of Teaching Black. I look forward to the way that it moves through the world, the ways things come back to us, to quote Ana, in ways that we didn’t even imagine. But, for now, this gentleness feels really, really good. It feels nice to stand here and trust. I think that’s part of the love, too. Moving the book with that gentleness and love. Nothing feels forced. It all feels like what it’s supposed to be.

AML: More gentleness. Maybe someone will encounter it virtually or in a library. The one thing I wish we had been more attentive to was the gap between the hardcover and softcover versions of the book—I wish it were more accessible. We’ve had other ideas, like making it available via a website or having additional syllabi. Things like that. And then life happens, right? People are going through tenure processes, and people are, like me, stewarding ten acres of land. Sometimes things happen where you’re like, “Oh, okay. How does this fit into my life?” And it’s a question of faith and trust that it’s going to be in the hands of the folks it needs to be.

RJ: What’s next for you?

AML: Dr. brown, what’s next for you?

db: World transformation.

Hmm, what is next? What is now? I’m working on a couple of projects. I guess one could be considered more scholarly than the other, but I think scholarly also looks creative, as well. So I’m working on a book about ghosts and some poems. I’m feeling out my place in the literary world.

AML: I’m a platypus, so I’m working on a few things in terms of scholarship and literature. But right now one of the things I’m focused on with my partner is this ten-acre plot of forest we’ve come into in Oregon. We’re in the process of observing and imagining the place for QTBIPOC folks to be able to have a space out in the forest to write, read, and rest. We just had a beautiful drumming ceremony/festival on December 18, which was just gorgeous. We had about forty people here who willingly stood outside in thirty-degree weather for a few hours to dance to drums. So, yeah, working on beautiful things like that.