CAPTCHA / consciousness :: an OS [re:con]versation with Ava Hofmann

[Ava Hofmann is the author of The Woman Factory, an OS 2020 Digital Chapbook selection — explore the interactive, digital extension of The Woman Factory here. Read more about this series, with the theme “Bloom, Mutation, Entropy, Catalyst, Brine,” and get to know these exciting new projects at the OS Open Access Library, here, ]

Greetings comrade! Thank you for talking to us about your process today!

Totally!

Can you introduce yourself, in a way that you would choose?

My name is Ava Hofmann. I’m a trans woman. I’m an anarchist. I’m a ‘visual poet’, whatever that means. I was born in Oxford, Ohio, but right now I live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My poetry is mostly about queerness, communism, and the ways in which the personal and material are inextricably connected.

Why are you a “poet”/ “writer”/ “artist”?

Answers to these kinds of questions are always a kind of post-hoc explanation of the inexplicable, but basically: some aspect of the innate, totalizing creativity every person has when they’re a little kid was not squashed by my upbringing, and that little bit just happened to be the part that was about organizing words. I basically wanted to be a writer since I was in grade school (what a weird…