What is your name?
Yesenia Montilla
Where are you from?
New York City by way of Dominican Republic and Cuba
Who are your favorite authors and biggest inspirations?
Definitely Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Aracelis Girmay, these women have paved the way for the kind of writing and work I want to be a part of.
What was your first job as a writer?
Writing is not a job for me. So I’d say I’ve never had a “job” as a writer, I write poems and sometimes they get published, that’s pretty much it.
Where did you discover poetry and how did you get into it?
I’ve always loved poems. However while attending CUNY’s Hunter College I was a creative writing major, and thinking I was going to write novels; my first semester all the fiction writing classes were closed, so I took a poetry course with Tina Chang and that was it, I fell in love.
With how expansive poetry has evolved, what would you say are some of your favorite styles?
I am really into spoken word poetry, partly because I am in awe of the performance aspect of it and how much I wish I had the chops to be able to memorize and perform my poems this way. Performance poets — although I hate that there are distinctions between us —have taught me so much about how to read a poem, about inflection, about the kinds of choices we make while reading aloud, how our voice can build tension. So yes, I shoutout spoken word poetry every damn time.
Can you explain some of the ways you include your Afro-Caribbean culture into your writing?
I don’t know if it’s necessarily inclusion, I think I am Afro-Latina and if my work is a reflection of who I am, then it’s all there. I do tend to emphasize the struggles though of Afro-Latinidad, the nomadness of it at times; but I feel like everything I write is in service to my roots and my ancestors.
How do you prepare yourself to get into a writing mood?
Incense burning, some good tunes, is key. But honestly, I am always thinking about poetry and poems. At any given moment of the day I am writing poems in my head; so, once I sit down to jot them down, there’s very little preparation needed.
How would you say your writing had developed over time?
I don’t know honestly, I mean I definitely am more aware of the “choices” you have when crafting a line, how important word choice can be, where you break the line and how the poem looks on the page. All these things come with experience, as you read more poems and write more poems the blank page opens up to.
Do you have a general theme or motive that encompasses your work?
Love and awareness I suppose. Love everything/one but be aware that not everything/one can love you back.
I’ve noticed that one of your books, The Pink Box, was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. Can you explain how you went about publishing this book, and did you discover anything about yourself as you wrote it?
The Pink Box was my thesis project. I wrote it during my time at Drew University while pursuing an MFA in Poetry. A lot of hands and eyes went into that work. I had so many mentors and friends that helped along the way. With regards to publishing it, I was lucky to get a call from a mentor/friend Patrick Rosal asking if I had a manuscript ready because he had an editor Randall Horton looking for a poetry book by a Latinx poet. I sent him the manuscript and the rest is The Pink Box. The most important thing that I might have discovered during writing the book is that I still had so much to learn. I still believe this now.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers/poets?
Read a lot, study your craft, don’t give up, I’ve had a gazillion rejections. But most importantly make sure you find good readers of your work, not folks that are gonna say: this is great; all the time. Find folks that know writing and will give you real feedback.
Would you like to share a bit about your experience when you attended the Frontline Arts event at the Hunterdon Museum?
I love Frontline Arts and their mission so anything I can do to support them I will do. That event is one of my favorite events I’ve ever been a part. Folks were coming to me to write them a little poem on the spot, and quite frankly I felt I learned more from them, I got more out of it than they did. The connection I had with each person was electric and it felt like I was at family reunion.
Of the many different art forms people use to express themselves, why is it that writing is your tool in getting your voice out there?
It is the tool that the ancestors afforded me, that the universe said would be mine. All of us I feel have that creative outlet that’s ours we just have to figure out what it is. For me it’s writing, it is not something I chose, it chose me.
How has this pandemic and current events changed your life as a writer? What has stayed the same?
It is harder to write when everyone around you is suffering, but I look at it as a responsibility. People of color are dying at a higher rate than anyone else during this pandemic, that’s not hyperbole it’s fact. My job as a poet is not only to be a poet of witness but also to be a poet of evidence — as Khaled Mattawa said; and so if that is the case, it is my responsibility to continue to write my stories and those who I love, their stories too. Nothing is the same, I just saw my mom for the first time in 7 months just yesterday and we met outside and we both wore masks and we hugged sideways and we lamented over all the dying — this is not normal and I think we all have to remember that and not normalize this time in our lives.
Do you have any projects that you are working on now, or do you have something planned for the future?
I have a second book that comes out in 2022 via Four Way Books. The title of this collection is Muse Found in a Colonized Body and it’s really a study on the right now, what us folks have suffered and continue to suffer. It talks about the effects of coming from enslaved and colonized people and how if that is who I am, then how can I take all that inherited trauma and turn it into inspiration, into a muse, while also making sure I am writing for witness and for evidence as well. What I write about in this new collection: I have plenty of poems that are about the systemic killing of Black folks by the police – because witness and evidence are key here. I have poems about lovemaking too because sometimes that is the greatest escape in these times; but really what I am trying to understand is who I am because of the traumas my ancestors were subjected to and what does who I am mean in this time. How do I matter? How can I help? How do I survive?
For more information, visit : https://www.yeseniamontilla.com/
Interview by Hugo Gatica October 2020