In this second Keep the Channel Open feed drop, Rachel and Mike Sakasegawa discuss Bianca by Eugenia Leigh.

Rachel talks with long time friend and writer for children, Laurel Snyder. They talk about the Iowa Writers Workshop, Laurel’s path from poet to children’s book author, money, the novice brain, labor, being “messy and extra but not totally batshit,” the relationship between poetry and picture books, the experimental nature of picture books, world building, getting things out rather than getting things down.

Poets Safia Elhillo and Charif Shanahan talk to Isaac Ginsberg Miller, a poet and PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern, about their friendship, kinship, seeing and being seen by others, their intended audiences and ideal readers, inherited/received forms, experimentalism, the instability of racialized experience for many Black Southwest Asians and North Africans.

Poets Jason Schneiderman, Cate Marvin, R. A. Villanueva, Lynn Xu and Rachel Zucker consider the pleasures, challenges, eccentricities and value of live, in-person poetry readings. These musings are followed by excerpts of the June 6, 2023 reading in Bryant Park (hosted by Jason and featuring Cate, Ron, Lynn and Rachel) and comments from the audience.

Poet and interdisciplinary artist Moheb Soliman sits down with V Conaty at AWP in Seattle to talk about his debut collection HOMES, regionalism as a creative and critical practice, the poetics of the watershed, the “third coasts” of the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, having a non-extractive relationship to place, immigrant, indigenous, and settler narratives of the Great Lakes region, timelessness vs. timeliness, and memory.

Host Rachel Zucker talks with choreographer Hope Mohr about her dance Horizon Stanzas (inspired by Alice Notley's feminist epic The Descent of Alette), the live arts, performance and distributed leadership, and with writer Alyssa Harad about Mohr, Notley, performance, power, feminism and much more.

After a brief Commonplace update, Rachel shares episode 143 of Keep the Channel Open with host Mike Sakasagawa and guest Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a writer based in the Bronx, NY. In his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana presents us with a dystopian future America where convicted prisoners fight each other to the death in a televised bloodsport. The book is both a blistering critique of the US carceral system and an insistence on the inalienable humanity of every person. In our conversation, Nana and I talked about what satire and dystopia open up for him as a writer, why it’s important to him to implicate both the reader and himself in his work, and how he thinks about prison abolition. Then in the second segment, we talked about the seductive nature of success as an artist in a capitalist society.