What inspired your winning piece? What did the writing process look like?

Each of the four poems in Afterlives came at different stages in my manuscript and writing journey over the last 4 years. I wrote “At Dinosaur Land, the White Women Love Me” in 2023 during my MFA, when I was really wrestling with how to bridge the very familial, interior, and Biblical scope of my poetry with the expanding grief and rage I felt toward atrocities in our world. Over time, it became clearer how the Old Testament as a text was the key.

I wrote “hagar’s promise” in 2023 and “ado’s choice” in 2026, but they're tethered by my continual experience of seeing mothers in Gaza mourning their children murdered by the Israeli military, but more broadly by the indifference of American taxpayers. I was invested in the stories of Biblical mothers marginalized by the text itself making unfathomable demands of God centered around the inherent humanity of their children and their communities.

“To-Do List for the Next World” makes a similar move via the literary structure of Biblical genealogy to reconstitute each individual life of a massacre, or what Kaveh Akbar calls “to actually encounter the atrocity made atrocious.”

What were some of the factors that influenced you to submit to our Festival?

As a writer very indebted to my upbringing in Arkansas and my family's initial immigration to Ruston, Louisiana, I was really excited by the chance to bring my work “home”! Gumbo was my other reason: the woman who housed my parents when they first immigrated once made me gumbo many years after we left Louisiana, and I've been obsessed with eating and making it since. But I'd never been to New Orleans, so this was the perfect opportunity.

Describe the moment when you found out you were the winner!

I was home in Brooklyn jumping around and making a ruckus for my neighbors! After calling my partner, I called my mom whose ambivalence about poetry is always secondary to her excitement about bragging to her friends over things I've won.

What were some of your favorite memories from attending the Festival? 

It was so precious to experience Tina and Té’s work live and share common threads of our lives and writing! I also will remember forever a very good beignet I had at one of the workshops.

What are you working on now?

This year I've mostly focused on writing poems for friends and loved ones! My best cure for writing block is to be on my way to a birthday party without a gift.

 

At present, Tianyu is querying her manuscript, Mercy is the Clock Ticking Backwards from God.