Award-winning poet Jubi Arriola-Headley, who presented his debut collection, original kink, at Miami Book Fair 2020, grew up in Boston, made stops in New York, Washington, D.C., and Houston, and today lives in South Florida with his husband, Paulo. He’s also a Friend of the Fair, and he sat down with us recently to talk about this and that.
How did you first learn about Miami Book Fair?
Moving to Florida sort of coincided with my desire to become a more active writer, and I actually got introduced to Miami Book Fair through Lip Service. I started going to the fair and I fell in love. I think 2017 or 2018 was my first one.
And just a few years later you were presenting your debut collection at MBF.
I’m blessed. My writing trajectory – the angle’s pretty steep, if you graph it. Things just happened and then kept happening. But not everything happened; I am a writer like anybody else and get my share of rejections, but I’ve had some wonderful things happen to me since 2015, which is when I really started writing poetry actively as an adult.
When did you start writing the pieces that appeared in original kink?
In 2017; I took a writing workshop in Philadelphia with Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, VONA for short – they’re based in Miami – led by a poet named Willie Perdomo. There I met a wonderful cohort of poets, and Willie himself was wonderful, and I began to have the confidence to write in the voice that I was writing in, in my voice. Before that I was less sure of myself. I think there’s probably a point in every writer’s life where they wonder if they have whatever it takes to be a writer, to be a poet, and that workshop was where I began to get an inkling that I might. That was the beginning for me.
In 2020 the fair was presented as an all-virtual event – was that experience a bit bittersweet for you, since it was your first time presenting and it wasn’t in person, or did the excitement override any disappointment?
It was bittersweet, but it balanced in favor of it being my first and the book being very new. The book came out in October – and of course you know that Book Fair is in November – so it was very fresh. And it being the pandemic year, I actually had a conversation with my publisher about delaying the book. But we decided against it, which is good, because how long would we have had to delay it in the end?
Right.
I had imagined a wonderful book tour, but we’re poets and it was a poetry press, so it wasn’t like there were thousands of dollars to take me on that tour. I had been saving money to do my own tour. So it was bittersweet not being able to present the book in person, because one of the wonderful things for me about Book Fair is how it builds community. I love being immersed in an audience and sitting in front of four poets, for example, who are so diverse in their points of view and the forms they work in – and the issues and topics they work – and having conversations with them.
Your second poetry collection will be published soon – tell me about it.
It’s called Bound and it’s coming out in January. It was born in 2020; I was finishing up my MFA at the University of Miami. We left for spring break and about four days before classes started again, we were informed that we should not come back. So we had to learn a whole new set of protocols to hold class virtually. That was shocking, and then I didn’t actually have a graduation (ceremony), obviously, because we were still in the pandemic. I think that, and the events surrounding the murder of George Floyd, weighed on me heavily. And about 10 days after Floyd’s murder I had a panic attack.
Was that the first one you’d ever had?
That was the first. I started hyperventilating, I couldn’t regulate my breathing, I was sweating. … Eventually I was able to slow my breathing back down. And I guess it was a combination of post-MFA fatigue, the pandemic, and George Floyd, but I didn’t, I couldn’t write another poem, another word, for the next six months. Then the night before the presidential election I thought to myself, “You know what? You’re gonna have to find a way to survive and keep writing, no matter how this election turns out,” and I wrote a poem. And from there till about June of the next year, I was a poetry machine. I wrote dozens; I had about 60, 70, poems, and I sent them to an editor I know, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram – they’ve had success in their own right and just dropped a new collection, Negative Money – to see if I had something. And Lillian said it could be something, gave me extensive thoughts about every poem, thoughts about ordering and themes, and that’s how Bound came to be.
There are a lot of themes about queerness and pleasure in the collection, because I think what came out of the entire experience of the pandemic and George Floyd is that we have to find ways to survive and thrive, no matter what the external world is doing. We have to build our own safe – and welcoming and celebratory – creative spaces. I wasn’t writing so much about the trauma we had all collectively experienced, I was writing toward some different iteration of myself and the world.
What’s the last great book you read, and what are you looking forward to?
There are two books that inspired me when writing Bound. The first is Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown. That’s about how the seeking of pleasure is an inherent right – we don’t have to deprive ourselves of it – and how it is liberatory, freeing, forward thinking, and can help us build worlds. It’s a collection of essays, most written by her. The other book that was very helpful to me is by Melissa Febos, Bodywork: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. It gave me a very freeing feeling in terms of how and what I could write about.
Besides Lillian’s new book, I’m looking forward to The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey, and Pig by sam sax.
You’ll be able to see both Nicole and sam at the fair this year!
Interview by Elisa Chemayne Agostinho; responses have been edited for space and clarity.
