“Gen-Z, you’re up”: An Interview with Michelle J. Pinkard, Ph.D.

“We’re at a moment of revolution, and we need the poets; we need the young poets to kind of document what it is to be in this moment.”

Michelle J. Pinkard is the founder and director of the I Want to Write Initiative at Tennessee State University, where she teaches African American Literature, Poetics, Women’s Studies, and Composition. She also serves as Chair of the Languages, Literature, and Philosophy Department at TSU. Her scholarship is inspired by intersections in African American, Gender, Modernism, and Creative Writing studies. She is also a poet whose work was published in Callaloo and African American Review. Pinkard’s essays, short stories and poems have appeared in several anthologies. Prior to teaching, Pinkard performed award-winning work in public relations and print journalism, which provided the investigative foundation to become an interdisciplinary scholar of African American cultural history. Ultimately, the apex of these varied interests is an examination of the way identity affects the creative process.

So I’m just gonna dive right in. I wanted to start off with the importance of being a black female writer. I want to know how your experiences as a black woman have impacted your creative writing and your creative writing journey.

You didn’t start soft. It’s a very interesting question because my whole academic writing journey has been about exploring the intersections of identity with the creative process and what that means. Individuals from marginalized communities bring a lot of weight to whatever they do. There’s the politics of representation; there’s the concerns of representation. We have our own internal dreams but also we almost inherit the struggle. So what does that mean for the creative process? has been a question that I’ve been pursuing for decades now. That feels weird to say. When I first started young and naive I just wanted to express something, but in picking up scholarship in African American literature, in gender studies, what does the creative writer owe to the struggle? What do they owe to themselves? How do they balance that? It’s something that I carry with me. It’s something that I ask of my students, and I know that words have weight, they have meaning, and they have power. And so I guess as a black woman, and the intersections of those identities, let alone all the various others that I have, it’s certainly something that I take with me to the page. Every time I write, every time I teach, every time I speak: It’s just in the room.

It’s really powerful. I definitely feel how powerful it is to write and also be a black woman at the same time because we don’t see a lot of that representation. It’s incredibly important to be able to bring those experiences and share those experiences with the audience you curate with your writing.

Certainly. I’m glad you’re also thinking about audience because when we’re writing, that person is in the room. Whoever that may be. Are we writing for someone or to someone or about someone, and what are our responsibilities there in terms of authenticity, representation, and getting it right? I can’t remember which workshop I was participating in, but it became a triggering moment when the person who was leading the workshop wanted us to identify who we were writing to. And at first, we say that easy answer, “Everyone.” No. Who is that person you have in mind? And then it became this very mental sort of activity: “Oh I’m writing for the father who abandoned me. I’m writing for this. I’m writing to the person who hurt me.” We find out that individual experiences resonate with the public experience and that the public experience resonates with our personal. I think part of that writing journey is figuring out how are we having a conversation with the world, and what is the world placing on us? And how do we make sense of that in the time we have here?

That’s really powerful. You talked a little bit about your students. I also wanted to discuss your background in education, you being a professor at TSU. I’m interested in knowing how working with a predominantly black crowd of students and seeing their work has impacted the way you go throughout life.

Well how do they teach me is one thing, because no class that I’ve taught has been the same. They all bring their own experiences, their own approach, their own ideas to poetry, and I guess the initial question is, how do I approach teaching them? One of the things I strive to do — and I think any instructor in the creative space probably does this — is I strive not to teach them to write like me but to write like them and to find their voice and figure out what voice means. It’s a balancing act to make sure they’re learning the various artistic tools to bring out that voice without saying, “Okay, this is correct,” or “This isn’t.” At the same time we have so many conversations about what is good poetry and what is bad, and we start off real nice: “Oh, there’s no such thing as bad.” But what poetry survives your moment? What poetry lives? Document something that is real, that is happening, that is human, that tells the human condition beyond yourself. That’s the goal behind my teaching. To answer your question about my experience with teaching, I’m bringing in my own life experiences. I didn’t start off in education. I double-majored in Mass Communication and English, and I initially was a print journalist. I think I got a lot from learning, intersecting with people’s lives, detail. What does it feel to be alive in that moment? Then I got into this period where I just wanted to write poetry and went back to grad school, just learning what poetry is, what it means to different people, and how it can effect change. One of my common statements, you’ve probably heard it before, is “At the beginning of every revolution is the poet.” So I feel like we’re at a moment of revolution, and we need the poets; we need the young poets to kind of document what it is to be in this moment in 2021, 2, 3. Oh my goodness! I don’t envy this generation, but you guys are at the precipice of something that’s going to be huge for decades, centuries to come.

I think that’s really powerful to talk about how poems can effect change. I think that one thing Gen Z is very cognizant of is how the times we are in are very difficult. We are very much at the, like you said, the precipice of a revolution, and I feel like a lot of creative writers, especially young creative writers, have that revolution reflected in their work. And it’s really important to talk about the way that we write, what we write, and how it effects change.

Indeed. At this time, more than any other time, it feels like language is almost at the center of politics in a very nuanced way. And we can talk about the age of Trumpism, but what really struck me about Trumpism is the “alternative facts.” What is a fact? What is divisive language, what is the CRT [Critical Race Theory]? All of these words. Language is being questioned, how language is being absorbed. It seems to me that many people in the debate of language are starting to fully appreciate the power of language and what that means. And so now, more than ever, it’s time for the creative writer to help to define this moment. So certainly, Gen Z, you’re up. There’s a lot going on, but I know that language is at the center of it. Language is definitely at the center.

I very much agree. I want to go back to you talking about intersection and identity. I noticed that on your website, that is something you talk about pretty heavily. I want to know, in your opinion, how does intersectional identity affect the way that one writes?

Wow, okay I have written papers and dissertations, but I’m trying to put this in a way that’s accessible. Okay, my journey with intersectionality and creative writing started with studying the women of the Harlem Renaissance, and really the Harlem Renaissance poets. And very early in that journey, people would come to me and say, “There are women writers?” So part of that, in that question is, who is recognized? Whose voices are recognized? How do different identities approach protest, because the Harlem Renaissance was a moment of literary protest and resistance. Who is acknowledged in these voices? Who is rendered invisible? So this is what the tenets of intersectionality teaches us: that certain people, certain groups are rendered invisible because they’re in these overlapping identities where we talk about race and gender. For instance, the politics of race sometimes ignores gender; the politics of gender sometimes ignores race, and if you’re in both of those camps, you’re trying to find your voice in both of these spaces. And so my studies found that a lot of Harlem Renaissance women poets were being ignored — even though they offered a different perspective towards protest, towards resistance. Even though women for the most part outnumbered male poets at that time. We know Langston Hughes, we know some of the other names, but a Georgia Douglas Johnson published three volumes of poetry during that decade, and we’re now just kind of refinding those individuals. It took an Alice Walker to bring back Zora Neale Hurston, who was kind of etched out of history until her resurgence. So, finding a voice to represent a whole community that has been rendered invisible. Again, we talk about the obligations of writing and representing that silenced voice, but we also have to talk about the responsibility of getting it right because if you’re taking on people who have been silenced, people who have been marginalized, this is where the scholarship comes in. Patricia Hill Collins called it “subjugated knowledge.” To know what it is to be subjugated and what that experience is and to translate that onto the page takes scholarship, takes commitment, takes investment. To answer your question, my intersection — black woman, scholar, first-generation college student, class — all of these things helped to inform my experiences in subjugated knowledge and then translating that into the page, or finding at least the urge to do that. It is a constant battle. Going back to those Harlemites, Langston Hughes famously wrote that racial mountain essay where he talked about the struggle. It opens with this conversation with a poet he won’t name, and one poet says “I want to be identified as just a poet, not a black poet.” That struggle of do I want to lead with my identity? Do I want to lead with my art? Fortunately, in our contemporary time, we don’t have to make that choice. We have learned how to blend those in a way by learning from the lessons of the past.

That actually kind of reminded me of something that I talked about in my Introduction to Literary Studies class, about how people are rendered invisible if they meet with those intersections. This isn’t a question I had written down, but I wanted to talk about the literary canon and how you feel about what it means to have that representation in what we read as students. I definitely think that the literary canon is overrun by white male authors and we do not see a lot of contemporary authors, and even authors like you were talking about, who were part of the Harlem Renaissance who were women and writing these great works of literature. We don’t see that a lot in the literary canon, and I want to know your thoughts about it.

I think you’re touching on something that has happened in academia just as it happens with world politics. Some group somewhere says, “This is the list of work worthy of study.” And by saying what’s worthy of study, they’re also saying what’s not worthy of study. They’re passively sort of doing this. I didn’t fully grasp or get introduced to other writers until college and grad school. So it’s really a shame that we don’t see our voices and our experiences as much as we should. I think it helps us become well-rounded humans. We can’t live the whole experience, but literature helps introduce us to other thoughts, other experiences. My introduction to writing poetry came ironically in my ninth grade English class. I was a very poor student at the time ,and my English teacher put a copy of Nikki Giovanni’s Nikki Rosa on my desk, and this poem looked nothing like the Shakespearean, Chaucer brand of poetry that people taught me what poetry was before that moment. It was in my voice. It was in my experience. It used anecdotes from black culture, and one of my favorite lines from that piece, “Black love is Black wealth.” This idea that there’s something redeeming and literary within the culture. I didn’t have the words in ninth grade, but I said, “This is poetry?” It opened the door for me to be introduced to Audre Lorde and all these other poets and voices. When I finally met Giovanni, I blurted out “You saved my life. You made me invest in language and literature in a way that I felt was closed for me.” When we don’t pay attention to diversity in the curriculum, and you eliminate voices and perspectives and representation, you essentially just lock people out of the conversation. You make them feel like they’re outside looking in. And it wasn’t too long ago that people started having these conversations. Black literature, classes, and things of this nature really came into vogue around the 70s and 80s. Toni Morrison was one of the first who really started to build what was called an African American literary canon in resistance to that, and she answers your question in an interview. Someone asked her, “Do you always have to write about race?” She pointed out that everyone is writing about race; some folks are privileged enough to act as if they aren’t. But because it is so ingrained in this American culture, we are writing about our experiences with these various identities.

Now I want to get into some of the works that you sent me. You sent me two pieces, the first being “A Turtle’s Affirmation,” in which you take on the perspective of a turtle, and I’m really interested in knowing a bit about how this piece came into fruition and your thoughts behind it.

I mean, the quick and easy answer is that I had a turtle for like six years, and so I observed how a turtle lives and moves, and I try to be the best turtle parent I can be. But I knew at times that that turtle was trying to escape. This notion of feeling caged, fighting this defeated sort of feeling, I just kind of saw that in the metaphor of the turtle, and even finding success in what might be considered failure from others. Because really at the end of that poem the turtle doesn’t live, but they’re able to live a life in a way that validates them, that they internalize or they define victory in one way, whereas the world may come at them and cage them in another. I see that in the experience of marginalized people and the experience of what it feels to be faced with insurmountable odds and keep going in spite of that. That’s at least what I was trying to tease out in that piece, but I also like a little humor. I thought a little satire might be interesting. My students often tease me and say, “Oh you classes need to come with a trigger warning,” because we’re constantly talking about the challenges of what it is to be alive in this moment. But at the same time, poems don’t always have to be this dark, tragic space. There’s hypocrisy and humor and all of these spaces that span the human experience, and I just enjoyed that poem.

I enjoyed it too. I really did, and you saying that poetry doesn’t have to be this dark space all the time kind of brings up a question of writing about trauma and finding a balance in between that because I feel like, in my personal experience, with the trauma we do have, as writers as creatives, we feel pressured to make something out of it. Personally, for me, I’m learning that sometimes you can’t make things out of trauma. Sometimes trauma is just trauma, and there’s nothing to gain from that. It’s just something that you live through and that you move on from. I want to know your thoughts about writing with traumatic experiences.

I think it’s interesting because I told you the trigger-warning joke my students have, but at the same time, I have been having them engage in what we call witness poetry, thinking about how do we put ourselves in these spaces even though we may not live them. We live trauma through YouTube. We live trauma through watching these various videos of people being attacked by folks in power. We’re constantly in this space of trauma, and I think part of what the poet can do is help us to ask questions, to grow, to think about it. I was thinking about what you were saying, and how we experience trauma and how do we write about it sometimes? Let’s go back to just the writing process. I tell everyone in every writing class, whether it’s poetry, composition, the two most important elements: audience and purpose. Maybe if we think about writing about trauma, maybe the purpose isn’t just about going through it or having a solution. As poets, if we think about what is the purpose of this poem, it may not be closure. It may be a spotlight, it may be bringing our attention to the way power is constructed, and how power led to this trauma. It may be about encouraging folks to ask questions instead of always thinking they have the answers. We are a narcissistic folk, humans in general. We just think we know everything, but sitting in the question may be the point — acknowledging a feeling, defining a feeling, naming what hasn’t been named. Many of us know the bigness of trauma, but what are the small day-to-day implications that perhaps the poet can tell us or shed light on? Claudia Rankin’s book Citizen was created just to define the microaggressions of identity and what that means. Just day-to-day little interactions that can build up in our psyche, but if we don’t pay attention to them can be a torment on the soul. So trauma, of course, is part of the human condition, but the poet can help us think about it in ways that may not be purely curative steps. But how do we address it? How do we move through it? How do we engage in it in a healthy, thoughtful way? How do we live a thoughtful life? I think the poet is the guide for that.

I think that’s very true and kind of in line with what I was saying. It can help to move through something, help us discover things that we need to discover. It doesn’t have to necessarily be for the point of making something beautiful. It can just be helping you and even possibly helping other people reading it to move through the trauma they’ve experienced, and I think that’s really powerful.

Or this feeling is an acceptable feeling, this I’m-not-alone-in-this feeling. This poet is able to define what I have been avoiding. This poet is helping me cope in the space. I tend to think of poetry as a service. For the last few years, my students and I have been thinking about the therapeutic elements of poetry. I had one Ph.D. [student] who is pursuing psychology and wants to include poetic psychology as a part of his practice, just like some folks want to use art. I think it’s a way to help us think about our tragedy. I think part of not being cured from tragedy is our avoidance, our escapism. We tend to try to run away from what’s hurting us, and poetry helps us have a conversation with it and come to terms.

Going back to the pieces that you sent me, I want to talk about your piece “Altar Call,” which I feel is such a palpable experience within the community, and I want to talk about the black church and how it also has a palpable effect on the black community and therefore its writers whether it’s positive or negative. I want to know how the black church has cultivated you and why you felt it was necessary to portray the power dynamic in this piece.

Again, thinking about intersectionality and growing up in the church, it was always apparent to me that the women were running it. There is a dynamic, even just in black culture, where we’re taught to support and uplift black men in a way whereas we train black women to be soldiers, and strong. So growing up, just eyeing these kinds of dynamics in the church, I always found it very peculiar, and I couldn’t put a name on it until scholarship and until you invest in it. But you see it, and you feel it growing up, and it’s not all negative. But again, using poetry as an opportunity to ask questions: What patterns are we reproducing over time? I’m trying to think of a pastor because there are many that have been called out for questionable behavior and taking advantage of this desperation of the women, and black women particularly who are raised through respectability and are taught to hide sexuality and be hush about it. In a way it sort of imprisons, and you just feel it bubbling under the surface and some relationships within the church. That is what I’m trying to explore and tease out, sexual and gender tension in the church and how is that driving it? The poem starts off with him, the pastor, not necessarily respecting these women. I thought the vantage point of him looking down on this culture of women, trying to kind of play with how we place people who don’t necessarily deserve it. I wouldn’t say it’s culture-wide, but I think the politics of the church in some spaces should be questioned. I grew up in the church. I still consider myself spiritual. Part of me definitely has issues with organized religion, although I do believe in everyone pursuing their peace and their joy. I guess my criticism for some elements of organized religion is bubbling through that poem.

When I was reading this poem, it definitely brought up a lot of my own experiences with the church, and particularly how I noticed a lot of similarities with the black church and the Civil Rights movement and how they’re intertwined. How black men in the Civil Rights movement were the ones that were uplifted versus the women, who were just expected to be the supporters of the black men.

And they did all the work. They were making the signs. They were calling the meetings. They were making the lunches, but again regulated to the shadows. It takes people like ourselves, who have the creative ability and the scholarly ability, to dig up these histories and try to capture it. I think one of my favorite trends that I’m seeing in contemporary poetry is the persona poems, bringing these voices into poetry that have been erased to history. Challenging elements of black culture, particularly in our contemporary moment, is interesting. Harlemites wouldn’t have done the poem that you’re talking about now because it was all about trying to confront racism and myths and stereotypes. So they would write poems that pointed out that African American culture is above and beyond the beliefs that you guys are using. Now we’re seeing poets question what’s happening within black culture and how can we empower ourselves? We are also recognizing — and fingers crossed that we continue to do so — the diversity within black culture, that we’re not just one class, one religion, one experience, one gender identity, one sexual identity. So I think that’s part of the responsibility in that as well.

With you talking about how the black community is, realizing that we’re not a monolith, there’s also been what I have experienced, especially within black Gen-Zers, a separation from organized religion. Because of, like we were talking about in your poem, the power dynamics at play in Christianity and in Black churches, but also there’s a lot of shaming tactics within the black church. There’s a lot of feeling like we have to be one way in order to reach salvation. I think there’s power in recognizing not only the issues within the black church, but also recognizing that organized religion and believing in a god can be separate. You don’t have to go to church to believe in God, and I think that’s an incredibly nuanced stance that a lot of people are taking now.

It is, and I’m gonna just speak for me. I grew up in the Baptist faith, so it wasn’t really until the 90s — and some churches still have issues with this — putting a black woman behind the pulpit. As I’ve become more open to different experiences — I was part of a village that raised a trans child; I consider myself an ally — and so hearing hard rules against identity, I couldn’t reconcile those sorts of beliefs with a God that I was raised on. At the same time, religion is interwoven into our contemporary politics in such an interesting way. Some use religion in a way, to me, that feels like it oppresses anyone who does not belong to a mainstream identity or privileged identity. Historically, African Americans have used religion to fight racial oppression. Thus, at its best, religion can be used as a political vehicle for liberation. It’s when it’s used to oppress anyone that really bothers me. But within the poem that you’re talking about, just thinking about black woman and black male dynamics. That’s something that I want to constantly tease out in my writing and in my scholarship, again, how black women are trained to think of black men as kings we need to protect. Sometimes the support doesn’t feel both ways. What are we to do with that? How do we acknowledge that? It’s something that has been with us since the culture of slavery and beyond, but we are in 2023, and I think it’s up to the poet to ask questions. I may not even have all the solutions like we talked about, but sometimes the solution is in asking the question. Why are we repeating things that we know have failed in the past? History may not necessarily repeat itself, as I say all the time, but I think there’s one person who said it rhymes, and if we keep hearing that echo, who is it going to be that calls us out and says, “Hey, wait a minute. What are we doing? Why are we repeating these negative behaviors and adopting them and then passing them onto our children?” There are fights that we’re still having, that Gen-Z is now facing. We’re repeating the same arguments we were doing in the 90s, 80s, 60s. Why are we having the same fights? When I was Gen-Z’s age, I was just like “Oh, we just have to wait till the racists pretty much die out. We’ll be okay.” But some things were passed on that were happening in the quiet living rooms, that were happening in these quiet spaces that are now here for us to confront. I think it’s up to the poet to go into those quiet spaces and talk about how the public is affecting the private and how the private is affecting the public and question those relationships.

I want to talk about your organization, the I Want to Write Initiative. That was a very interesting aspect of your website. I want you to go into depth about your organization, what it does, and why it was important for you to create it.

Excellent! I was a first-generation college student. My family and I knew what it was to be exactly broke. The fact that I went to college and earned multiple degrees was a surprising thing for most people in my space. I knew the liberating aspect of poetry and language, and it is really part of my journey in terms of giving back to students, giving back to young writers of color, ways to find a space to explore the challenges that they face, to explore their voice. So, it was always my dream to start a center that serves this community that has been silenced in so many other ways, that efforts are still being made to silence. We can talk about all the political implications of how dare we talk about racism? How dare we talk about sexism? How dare we talk about homophobia? I’ve always been inspired by poet Margaret Walker, so the I Want to Write Initiative, that line “I want to write” is one of her poems. I am always fascinated by spoken-word culture. I don’t consider myself a spoken-word artist; we say writers of the page, writers of the stage here, but there is so much support for spoken-word culture here at TSU. And when you hear it, they are twisting metaphors, they are having fun, they are doing things with literary devices. But we try to get them to write essays and they’re like, no. So, getting them to understand what’s powerful in these spoken-word spaces can happen in other spaces, showing students a relationship of language is always important to me. So having a space dedicated adjacent to the classroom, but outside of it where they don’t feel pressured by the politics of grades is important, and also creating opportunities where TSU poets, writers, creatives can go outside of the community and work that service through their language is important. I Want to Write creates opportunities for publication, also once a year, we host a free creative writing workshop and open it to the community as part of our service to the community. I invite spoken word artists because I learn so much from them. It’s just a space for us to fully explore what it is to live a poetry inspired life.

I think it’s incredibly important to have a safe space for writers, and these are predominantly black writers you’re talking about. To not only have this space for them, but to have these opportunities for them to get their work out there, because I definitely feel that we’re lacking in doing that for a lot of black writers. I think that’s incredibly important and I’m so glad you’re doing that kind of work.

Well thank you. I’m hoping I’m planting seeds so that when you guys are my age, you will pass it forward as well and that we will remember the moments that we share with our peers. And discussing what’s happening in the world that you guys will soon inherit.

This is my last question: I want to know what is the best piece of writing advice you received that you would want to pass on to others, and how did it impact your writing?

Read, read, read. Read poets that you enjoy, read the ones that you don’t. Learn different voices, different approaches. Experiment, and then try to write something every day. Even if it’s not great — most of the time it won’t be,— write something every day because you have to serve the muse. This is what I learned from my mentor: If you ignore the muse, she will ignore you, and writer’s block is the most painful thing. You think, okay I’m going to make time, I’m going to find a quiet space, and the muse does not want to meet with you. You did not make a reservation with her. It is so frustrating, but if you’re constantly feeding her, she will return in kind.

Kaleia Branch is a junior English major and Psychology minor at Middle Tennessee State University. She is on the staff of MTSU’s creative writing journal, Collage.