Interview with Anaïs Duplan and imogen xtian smith

Waves Breaking

In this episode, I dive deep into one poem with its authors, Anaïs Duplan and imogen xtian smith. Tune in for our conversation about of art, love, and utopias.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and St. Joseph’s College.

His video works have been exhibited by Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2021.

As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He works as Program Manager at Recess.

• An's website
• An's Twitter
• An's Instagram

imogen xtian smith (fka xtian w) is a poet & performer. Recent work is featured or forthcoming in Peach Mag, Cosmonauts Ave, the Rumpus, & WE WANT IT ALL: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. They live in Brooklyn.

• imogen's Twitter
• imogen's Instagram

Places, people, art, books etc. mentioned in this episode:

• We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, ed. by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel
  • An interview I did a while back with Kay Gabriel and the other editors of Vetch
  • An interview I did with Andrea Abi-Karam
• Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop
• Take This Stallion
• An and imogen's Trans Oral History project
• Mohammed Zenia's Tel Aviv
  • imogen's review for Tel Aviv for the Poetry Project
• Posthumous selected works of Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantments
• Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day
• Terrance Hayes
• Bahar Orang's Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty

Editor and Social Media Manager: Mitchel Davidovitz

The Sound of Waves Breaking is "Gymnasium, Class Reunion in Distance" by ecfike. Meeting people in-person and hugging after a long period of time? I miss that and them.