“Poets Disrupting the Status Quo”: Kemi Alabi, Paul Hlava Ceballos, Anni Liu & Christopher Soto

Anni Liu is a writer, translator, and editor from the Chinese Northwest and the Midwestern United States. Her poems and translations are published or forthcoming in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Two Lines, Pleaides, and Quarterly West, among others. The collection Border Vista (Persea) intimately narrates the experience of being undocumented, or precariously documented, in America. In poems that consider migration an ongoing process rather than a finite event, Liu writes exquisitely on fear (useful and paranoid) and agency, loneliness, and the way the violence of the carceral state shapes our most intimate relationships – to each other and to the land. As she does, she revisits moments of unexpected poignancy: searching for turtles in a drainage ditch, picking crabapples along a rural highway, and smelling the namesake flower of her mother, who is half a world away.

Christopher Soto is a poet based in Los Angeles. A 2019 CantoMundo fellow, they are the author of the chapbook Sad Girl Poems and the editor of Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. They were honored with Them’s 2022 Now Award in literature for representing the cutting-edge of queer culture. In debut poetry collection Diaries of a Terrorist (Copper Canyon Press), Soto demands the abolition of policing and human caging. Throughout, they use the “we” pronoun to emphasize that police violence happens not only to individuals, but to whole communities. Their poetics open the imagination to possibilities of existence beyond the status quo. Soto asks, Who do we call terrorist, & why? These political surrealist poems shift between gut-wrenching vulnerability, laugh-aloud humor, and unapologetic queer punk raunchiness. Diaries of a Terrorist is groundbreaking in its ability to speak, from a local to a global scale, about one of the most important issues of our time.

Kemi Alabi’s poems and essays appear in The Atlantic, Poetry, Boston Review, Catapult, Guernica, them, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2, Best New Poets 2019, and elsewhere. As cultural strategy director of Forward Together, they’ve built political power with cultural workers of color through programs like Echoing Ida, a home for Black women and nonbinary writers, and annual art campaigns like Trans Day of Resilience. They co-edited The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press) with Cynthia R. Greenlee and Janna Zinzi. Against Heaven (Graywolf Press), Alabi’s debut collection, reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born. Instead of turning to predetermined salvation, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest. It’s a collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit’s capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing – the highest power there is.

Paul Hlava Ceballos’ work has been published in Poetry magazine, Pleiades, TriQuarterly, Poetry Northwest, Bomb Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times, among other journals and newspapers, and has been translated to Ukrainian and nominated for the Pushcart. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker, Christina Sharpe, and Torkwase Dyson. His debut collection banana [ ] (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the 2021 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. The poems in banana [ ] examine the extractive relationship the United States has with the Americas and its people through poetic portraits of migrants, family, and personal memories. At the heart of the book is a long poem that traces the history of bananas in Latin America using only found text from sources such as history books, declassified CIA documents, and commercials. The book includes collage, Ecuadorian “décimas,” a sonnet series in the voices of Incan royalty at the moment of colonization, and a long poem interspersed with photos and the author’s mother’s bilingual idioms. The collection traverses language and borders, history and story, traditional and invented forms, and guides us beyond survival to love.