This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you talk about what you discussed in your lecture? 

The lecture today is based on the classroom talk I had earlier in the afternoon. The classroom was reading my book Philosophy and Hip-Hop: Ruminations on Postmodern Cultural Form. I talk about the United States and democracy by fusing a conversation of my hip-hop work with my political work. This was achieved through my goal today of speaking about the question of bad faith. My context for bad faith comes from the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, a French existentialist in the early 20th century. His concept of bad faith had to do with the fact that individuals seem to be forced to deny themselves to be accepted and recognized by others. It’s this constant interplay of self-creation and others’ acceptance to a point where you get into this conflict of the self-being for others. And so I wanted to talk that out a little bit using the American political system. 

The United States itself, to continue to be seen as the city on the hill, the greatest country in the world, has to somehow deny aspects of itself — the ugly part of itself. And so it operates as a bad-faith actor. I wanted to see, how does hip-hop deal with this? So I said, hip-hop has always been a resistance movement. Resisting this idea that “I must be recognized.” In this war of recognition, hip-hop says, “I’m not gonna forget where I came from, which is blues tradition. But I won’t let the blues consume me.” It’s this idea of flipping the script of turning the table on itself. I try to use the example of hip-hop to show that it does have its problems, challenges, and conflicts. But at its best, what it attempts to do is create some reconciliation of bad faith by trying to keep it real, and by trying to understand what realness is, and authenticity, and be an example of what that can be through voice and music.

You use the painting “The Scream” by Edvard Munch to better understand hip-hop as a genre. Can you speak to that?

Well, in that piece, it forces us to think about sound, right? Because there’s no sound in that picture. But it’s clear anxiety, it’s clear frustration. And no matter what, you can almost hear the scream in the visual. And it makes you think about what it means to be de-voiced or what it means not to have a microphone. You scream. I think that’s what made me think about the beauty of what the Harlem Renaissance was about — let’s use our jazz, poetry, and politics as a way of screaming. And we kind of see that in the formation of hip-hop. But I think through the advances that Black folk have made politically, we lost a lot of that kind of intentional pushback against the United States. And I think modern hip-hop does a small part of pushing back until they start making a whole bunch of money. Because hip-hop becomes a part of the very thing that detracts from the humanity of others. When you talk about misogyny or preoccupation with sex, drugs, money, all that kind of stuff takes away from a sense of community and a sense of identity formulation. 

Do you believe that modern-day hip-hop can be truly radical? 

I don’t think so. But I think I’m the wrong person to ask because I don’t believe there’s much radicalness in the United States, period. I think about the ways in which the reality is, though, that Black folk are pacified people. And no music is gonna change that. No lyric is gonna change that. Maybe our parents or grandparents did when they had music like Black protest music because that intentionally got people in serious trouble. But now, we must ask, are there still true revolutionary voices in the United States? Sure there are. But are they gonna be put on an EP? Nah. Because it would be too disruptive. I think people often cite Kendrick Lamar as someone disruptive. In a sense, he’s face-level destructive. But he doesn’t have the FBI watching him. Because in the process of making music, there’s so much give and take for you to be accepted by the majority. There has to be some palatability. They have to feel comfortable with you. And sometimes comfortability yields specificity. I always say that if too many white folk like you, you aren’t doing the work. An example I gave earlier would fit this answer a little bit. When N.W.A. in ’89 said, “F**k the police,” that caused a lot of problems for them individually and for music in general. They were disruptive. But the song now plays every day on radio shows. So in order to start a dialogue on this you would have to show me an artist who’s doing something that hasn’t already been punished that now is palatable. 

What got you into this research? 

You know, I went to Howard University and I played for Bison Athletics. But I realized I wasn’t gonna make the League. At the time, I was student body president of Howard. I brought Cornel West to campus in ’93, and it changed my life. I mean, just talking to him. And quite frankly, I hadn’t even read much of his books. I had read Race Matters because it came out in ’93, and everybody was reading it. But then, talking to him and hearing his genuine concern about me as a student, he needed to ask around about me, and he wanted me to come to study with him. So, he forced me to take scholarship and academics seriously. I mean, I graduated with a 2.9 GPA. I wasn’t a scholar. I was always involved in activism, but I never considered myself a scholar. But under him, I learned to appreciate scholarship. Then, in my first year working in Cornel’s office, I met Tricia Rose. At that time in ’95, Tricia Rose had just written a book called Black Noise. She wrote this book as a part of her dissertation. I just spent time talking to her, and then, she introduced me to a student who at the time was a junior, and he wrote a senior thesis on creating a hip-hop class at Harvard. His name is Jon Caramanica. It was Jon that helped me realize I could do some work in hip-hop.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This month you played the role of adult Addie at Dobama Theatre in the regional premiere of Make Believe. What was this experience like? 

The writing was fantastic. It’s really layered. It’s really nuanced. It rolls off the tongue. With contemporary theater, it’s pretty clear when the writing is solid because it’s easy, if that makes sense. I feel like Wohl took some risks with the play. The first half is about the kids, and it’s acted by kids. It’s unique in that we’re not watching something meant for children; we’re watching an adult play with adult themes. As you move into the second half of the play, it’s the children as adults and what happened to them. Usually what you’re doing as an actor is you’re building a character’s history based on the text, but you don’t get to see it. In Make Believe, you get to see it at rehearsal every day — the mannerisms of who you are going to become or the circumstances of what happened to these kids. 

We split the rehearsal process up for various reasons, one of those reasons being the content of the play. The trauma of childhood comes to light in the second half. We were very protective of the kids because they were 10, 11, and 12 years old. The director, Nathan Motta, worked closely with their parents, giving them lots of conversations, time, and resources to be able to decide for themselves what they wanted to share with their kids about the themes of the play. As they left and the adults began, the kids would talk about what they may have discovered that day in rehearsal. We had this hand thing where we’d go whoosh, and it was a metaphorical way to clean the space from all that was there and start anew. It’s a little ritual to cross the threshold and to step out, because the themes were pretty heavy. It was important that we did that kind of safe work. 

 Can you describe your process for preparing roles that require conjuring up strong emotions and a character’s past history? How did you prepare for your role in Make Believe, specifically? 

That’s what I like to teach my students — that there’s a process to this thing. It does vary depending on the role and the character, but I always go back to circumstance and relationships, no matter the role. For the role of Addie, we’re exploring her childhood and everything in between until this moment, so I did a lot of crafting of her history. I think about where her relationships are now with these siblings and how they’ve changed or grown or been stilted. With Addie in particular, she blocked out a lot of stuff, so it was figuring out those things. I also did a lot of personalization. I myself have three older siblings and a younger sibling, so it’s finding those parallels. 

How do you balance teaching theater at Oberlin and being involved in the world of theater and acting yourself? Which takes a priority in your life, if either of them do? 

I’ve been lucky enough to be a professional actor and be able to teach it for many years now. I’m also always trying to maintain an acting career. It’s part of me keeping up with my own artistry, and keeping myself alive in it is important. I feel really supported at Oberlin to continue working as an actor, and I’m so grateful for that. I also have a family, and that’s another huge — if not the biggest — part of my life. There’s still times when I’m like, “Anjanette, you should have said no.” You can’t just say yes to everything, you know? I lived so long as a hungry actor who just wanted to do everything, and I wasn’t as good at balancing. I don’t take on more than three projects a year. It has to do with juggling and balancing and figuring out, what can we handle? What can we not? When one thing starts to overtake something else, I check myself. It’s very important that, for example, being in this production doesn’t affect my teaching. It’s going to affect it a little bit. I’m going to be a little more tired and drink a third cup of coffee in the morning and things like that. But if we get into a danger zone with that, I have to really check myself. 

How do you see your career progressing as you continue to move forward in terms of acting and teaching? 

I’d love to continue to grow as an educator here in particular, because I do feel like this institution is the right fit. In terms of my acting career, I think I’m at an interesting place with it. I’ve been in this area for long enough now that I’ve developed a lot of relationships, and I have the ability to seek out projects and have conversations with people I’d love to work with. That was always a dream of mine as a younger actor. I just wanted to do good work with good people. I spent many years in New York acting in regional theater, but I’ve never felt like I had to be on Broadway or get the lead in a film. More importantly to me is doing good material and well-written work, whether it be film or theater. 

What advice do you have for young actors at Oberlin right now?

Some of it’s thinking every day about what kind of actor I want to be — defining that for yourself all the time. It’s going to start to translate into: who do I want to be? What do I want? You start to manifest that, and you start to set goals — real goals for yourself that you start to achieve. Don’t think that your fantastic ideal of a life has to be like anybody else’s. How do you define success for yourself? That requires digging deep inside yourself and finding out what that is, and even allowing it to change. What I wanted out of my career and my life has shifted and changed, but I’ve always tried to keep tabs on it and ask myself, am I happy? If not, then how do I start to move more toward what I want? Sometimes we get stuck in this idea of fame or what a successful actor is. Go a little deeper. What does that mean? What does that fulfill? What is success to you?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

How did you get started with creative writing? Has it always been an interest?

One thing I loved about Oberlin is it always felt like we were encouraged to explore anything that we were interested in. I never felt like I had to limit myself. I remember being at a party once as a first-year. Everyone was doing the thing where they’re like, “What’s your major?” and someone said Physics. Someone else talking to them was like, “Is that it?” I thought it was such a funny encapsulation of how you expect people to be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m Physics and Trumpet Performance.” That was just a really common thing, that you didn’t just have to be in one box. And so I took the opportunity to explore widely. I think I’d always been interested in creative writing. I took a writing class with former Professor of Creative Writing Dan Chaon. I learned a lot. I started taking poetry in 2020 because I heard about a cool workshop that was happening with Megan Falley. She teaches a workshop called “Poems That Don’t Suck,” which I highly recommend. I wanted to write poetry so that I could propose to my partner in the form of a poem. I turned out to really fall in love with it. I wasn’t published all that much, but I felt like if I could just learn to see the world a little bit more sharply and take down information, that’s already worth it to go through life noticing more.

Science is typically thought of as very separate from creative writing. How do these different facets of your life connect?

I think science is the lens through which I found my voice in poetry. It gives me new things to start to notice. This poem that got published is about how when you look out into the stars, you’re limited by the speed of light into how far you see. So anytime you’re looking at the stars, we’re looking at the past. Stars could have already died by the time they reach us. Imagine if you could travel really far into space, you’d be able to look back on planet Earth and see our past, too. Just being able to think about those things is inspiration — I’m trying to work through the beauty of the world through a scientific perspective. 

The other part of the story is that I got trained with a Ph.D. in Biology, but while I was at Carnegie Mellon, I started thinking about the way that Oberlin brings attention back to being in service to the world and thinking about bigger issues. I started to be really bothered that no one was training us how to talk about science outside the lab, talk about our work and why it matters, and to have a better relationship with science and society. I was really frustrated seeing science being misquoted in the news, so I started trying to figure out ways to do science communication. That led me to this whole process of developing workshops and a student group called Public Communication for Researchers. I was leaving the traditional science route. I have one foot in the science world and one foot in the writing world — the crossover has always been there. I think it’s a very Oberlin thing. It’s about how to do good in the world and change the world.

Can you talk a little bit about your writing process, either for this poem specifically or in general?

For me, poetry starts with keeping an idea notebook. I just started to go around the world and notice things and write them down, what Meghan Falley called “glimmers,” although I’m not sure if she created that term. Once you start having these, you can sit down and work. I would do some drafts, and then what was really the gift of finding poetry communities is I would meet with them every week to workshop. I did that for maybe two or three years after I took this workshop — just meeting and reading each others’ work and having some co-working time. I learned different things to look for in poetry to make it stronger. There became sort of a philosophy of poetry, of what I think makes something interesting. It’s balancing the ways you talk about abstract, emotional ideas, that we nicknamed “clouds” and “anchors,” things that are sort of specific and really down to what’s happening. And so I’m trying to find a good mix of those things. 

One of the funny things about this poem in particular: it’s my second acceptance ever. Last year, I racked up 100 rejections — I made it a goal to get 100 rejections, and then I celebrated. I had a rejection celebration party. In fact, I even submitted a version of this poem to the same contest last year, and it didn’t make it out of round one. What do I make of that? I kept working on it. So I think it’s also about the power of revision, that I tweak things and make things a little bit sharper. I said, “Okay, this is just another opportunity to keep working on it.” It’s not magic. You just keep doing it.

What about Oberlin do you think shaped you the most?

I felt encouraged to explore things based on intellectual interest and not based on already being good at them. I think it’s really important to do things that you enjoy even when you’re not good at them. I learned to pay attention to what was pulling me. It was a very exploratory time that let me not be constrained but learn from different disciplines. I think that’s something that was really good for me and I’ve tried to carry with me; following your interests where they go, as opposed to stopping them short. That’s the thing that still sticks with me more than 10 years later.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The cover of Dearborn depicts a postcard of the industrial aspect of the city of Dearborn. What is the meaning behind this? 

I told the editor that I was hoping for something whimsical and colorful because the stories are tragic comics. So when they sent this, I just loved it because it’s the Ford River Rouge Complex, and the automotive industry features a lot in the short stories. There were Arabs who arrived in the Detroit metro area before the Ford Motor Company started offering its employees $5 a day. There were just droves of Arab Americans and until this day there’s a lot of Arab Americans who work in the factories. It’s not uncommon that recently arrived immigrants, who might work in the factory for several years, would try to save up enough money in the hope of opening their own business. I like that the factory is on the cover, right? It’s just so central to the city and to the stories.

Your characters span a wide range of the Islamic spectrum. What was it like to shift from story to story with such different variations?

There’s a big contingent of Lebanese Muslims from the Levant Bay in Dearborn. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Iraqi Civil War, a lot of those immigrants left the Middle East and they came to the Detroit metro area. So over time, Dearborn became increasingly more Muslim. The majority of the Arab Americans are of Islamic faith, but it’s important to also know that the Arab world and Arab Americans are very religiously diverse, and that being Arab-American doesn’t necessarily mean you’re Muslim. In the story collection itself, I wanted to share a diverse range of voices and a diverse range of characters’ relationships with Islam. Some characters are religious, some characters are very secular, and some characters aren’t really believers. I also wanted to show that there’s no one experience of what it means to be Muslim; it means something to every single person, which  goes to my wanting to show the diversity of these voices. Just as there’s no one monolithic representation of what it means to be Muslim, there’s also not one monolithic representation of what it means to be Arab-American.

Can you describe what motivated you to address nonbinary identity in Arab culture? How have you worked to address queerness in Islam through your writing?

Dearborn is a very conservative city, and it’s not necessarily generational. There are a lot of young Arab Americans who are incredibly conservative and unfortunately have exhibited or demonstrated transphobic or homophobic views. So I wanted a queer character to be part of the world that I was creating, because they’re there. We have to recognize them. One of the characters, Yasser/Yusra, is a married butcher. He has a 23-year-old son and a wife. He’s always hid his identity and he’s trying to figure out who he is as a person. So, he goes every week to Hamtramck, which is a city within Detroit. In this Yemeni-American and Bangladeshi-American city, he forges a bond with a Yemeni woman and reveals his true identity. Before I published the book, there was an attempt to ban the display of the pride flag in Hamtramck. I just thought that was so devastating. How do you think that’s gonna make people from the LGBTQ+ community feel? They’re not gonna feel safe.

This semester, you are teaching Introduction to Fiction Writing. At the University of Michigan-Dearborn, the student population was vastly different from Oberlin College. How has your work changed?

At the University of Michigan-Dearborn, it’s mostly first generation students. Most of them are working 20 to 40 hours a week just to even pay their tuition. It’s a different student body. 

Before that, I actually taught for two years as a visiting professor at Kenyon College. I think that liberal arts experience really prepared me for my teaching career. What’s really exciting about Oberlin is that there’s a Creative Writing program that students can actually major in. There’s so many different aspects of Oberlin that really attracted me to the job, one of them being that there is a strong presence of creative writing and a strong sense of community. It’s really a dream job for me. 

How are your Arab-American community identity and your teaching content connected?

So, there’s a series of three courses I’ve already taught and maybe sometime in the future I will teach again. Particularly, an introduction to Arab-American literature and Arab-American women writers. I’m interested in the influence of the Arabian Nights on Arab culture, specifically the figure of Shahrazad. She tells stories to the king in order to save not only her life but the lives of other women. In Arab and Arab-American literature, there’s a lot of discussion about how Shahrazad is a feminist and a figure of resistance against male violence and patriarchy. So how do we examine how contemporary Arab-American writers use different tropes from the Arabian Nights, how they are even re-contextualized in a contemporary setting? 

On a personal note, it’s my experience in Dearborn that was just so unique because it was the first time in my life that I had ever lived in an Arab-American community. I grew up in the Middle East, actually, but my family came to the States in the early ’90s. I never really had Arab friends and my sister and I felt isolated like we were outsiders. Dearborn was so different, and it was such a transformative experience. It’s an American city, but at some points, you feel like you’re in the Arab world. The store signs are in Arabic. You walk into the grocery stores, and there are a lot of imported goods from the Arab world. When I’m in Dearborn, I speak Arabic with so many of the patrons. When you’re in Dearborn, you know that you’re in Dearborn.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What is the Oberlin Alumni Magazine? How do you curate content for each issue? 

In a nutshell the Alumni Magazine comes out three times a year. It’s basically a magazine that is sent to every single Oberlin alum, as the name implies, and is a mix of news — things going on at Oberlin, profiles, and news on alumni which is curated by us in the Communications department. 

I’ve been at this job for a little over six months — since March. I’m still sort of getting used to the rhythm of everything. I work in conjunction with various people to think about the best stories to tell and the best things to profile and highlight. One of the biggest sections is actually driven by alumni: our class notes section. It’s basically everyone submitting their exciting news, like “I put out a book,” or “I had a reunion with a bunch of Obies,” or “I performed in this really cool concert.” And then we also have obituaries, which is a very important part of the magazine, but it’s also sad. It’s telling stories about people who have passed on. So, the magazine is celebrating Oberlin as it is now and celebrating everybody’s achievements after Oberlin, too. 

You’ve had a really exciting career, both as a journalist and as an author, with published essays and biographies about pop stars like Duran Duran, Lady Gaga, and P!nk. How do you view your new role as the Oberlin Alumni Magazine editor within the greater context of your career? What similarities and differences exist? 

You know, it’s interesting: the job at the Alumni Magazine, in a very surprising sense, brings together many threads of things that I’ve done throughout my career. I’ve published essays and biographies about pop stars and that was a lot of research — that was a lot of writing and editing and working with various publishers on getting a book into the market. There’s a lot of moving parts. It’s very similar to putting out a magazine, in a sense, because you are working together with a lot of different people to produce something tangible that people can hold in their hands. Having to learn how to work with so many different people was really good preparation for my Alumni Magazine job. I’ve also had staff jobs at a weekly newspaper and a magazine where  you have to work with an art department; you have to work with writers; you have to work with marketing departments. That’s all very similar to what I do with the Alumni Magazine as well.

My through line throughout my entire career has been writing and reporting. I’m a very rigorous fact checker, and I edit myself almost harder than I do other people. Quality writing is very important to me, and that’s something that is important for me to bring to the Alumni Magazine as well, both on my own and then also helping writers and freelancers. In terms of differences, I’ve had several jobs, but I’ve actually never worked at a college before. So, that’s been really exciting because I went to a liberal arts college, so I’m very used to liberal arts colleges, and I’m a big fan of them. I like going to work every day. It’s exciting driving to campus; it’s all the fun of college, but I don’t have to study. I just have to go to my job.

How has your career prepared you for your work at Oberlin and with Oberlin alumni?  

What’s one of the more interesting things about my career is that I’ve written a lot about music, but I’ve done a lot of non-music stuff as well. I’ve written about business, I’ve written about startups, I’ve written about healthcare. And in all of those jobs, I’ve interacted with and written about a wide variety of people. I’ve interviewed everyone from CEOs of companies to young people starting companies. I’m working with alumni, and it’s a very similar thing. I’ll get phone calls from people — I got a phone call yesterday from someone who graduated in the class of ’59, but then I’m talking to people who graduated last year. It’s a total variety.

Throughout my career I’ve just loved talking to many different people. I think that that has prepared me for Oberlin. In general, my background is writing and editing and marketing and research and things like that. I never thought I’d find a career where all of my music background and everything else I’ve done could combine and be an asset, but that’s what I found at Oberlin.

Why do you enjoy writing about music and musicians? 

I love that question because I’ve been doing it for so long, and I rarely get a chance to kind of step back and think, “Why do I love doing this?” At heart, musicians are creative people. I talk to a lot of songwriters and they’re all very, very interesting people. They’re all conversationalists. I can count on one hand the number of musicians I’ve interviewed who are just sort of, eh, with one-word answers and things like that. You just don’t really run into people like that. They’re always really fascinating people to talk to.

I like writing about music because it’s a challenge, you know? Writing about music is not easy. It’s kind of an intangible thing, and you have to bring so much into it from lyrical analysis to deep listening to doing research about cultural context. So it’s a very multidisciplinary type of writing. Every album is different. You could love a band and love all their records, and they could release a record that you’re like, “This is not very good. How do I tackle this?” Every new album is sort of a challenge to write about. So it’s never boring. I’ve never been bored when writing about music in my entire career. 

What advice do you have for young writers, journalists, and music critics? 

Be curious, for starters. Always keep your ears open. Listen to as much music as you can. Just having a wide variety of things that you listen to and absorb is really helpful.

For young writers and journalists, I always tell people, just write every day and never be afraid to ask questions. Sometimes people might be like, “I don’t know if this question is something you’ve already answered before,” or “This is a dumb question.” I always say, there are no dumb questions when you’re talking to people. If you’re unsure about something, ask for clarity. I cannot tell you how grateful people are for making sure that they’re understood and making sure that people are conveying the point that they want to get across in a correct way. 

If there are students who are interested in talking about writing or journalism, the Communications Office has opportunities here and there. We are kind of like an open door, so people should feel free to reach out to us.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

It says on your website that you’re a writer and a sound artist. Can you elaborate a little on what this looks like and the kind of art you create?

I work between these two media primarily because I view poetry and writing as things that can also occur off the page. A lot of the sound-based work that I do is trying to make poetry more physically tangible — something that you can visualize in an installation setting, or literally walk through with multiple voices. My goal is to lift poetry off of the page and also place it in a particular location to encourage unanticipated or maybe nontraditional encounters with poetry. 

How did you get started with this unique form of media?

I like to tell the story that when I grew up as a classical musician, I began to get tired of playing the works created by other people. I wanted to compose my own. And that led me to try out being a composer, but it didn’t take me very long to discover that I was a terrible composer. So then I became a poet, because I was so greedy — I wanted sound, and I wanted imagery, and I just wanted everything. Poetry seemed to be able to encompass that. But even though I became a poet, I never lost my love for sound and other art forms. Whenever I can bring all of them back into contact with one another, whether it’s installation, or sound, or visual poetry, I try to take advantage of that.

Can you explain your creative process? What goals or intentions do you have with your art?

It varies a lot piece to piece, I would say. When I’m working on the page, a lot of it is almost collage-like. I have what I call a graveyard of lost poems, where I take pieces out and use them as seeds for other poems, and they just start to multiply. I often find that when I write one poem, I need to write that same poem in a different way, or a poem about that same topic in a different way. When it comes to my multimedia work, it often comes out of necessity. I know sometimes it can seem like, “well, why add all of these multiple modalities to something that’s already complete?” But I feel like when the topic demands complexity or polyvocality, or more layers, then I turn to these other media. 

A lot of times, my inspiration will come from something historical that I might be interested in. The book that I’ve been writing now is a collection of poetry about a place called Centralia, PA, which is near where I grew up. It was condemned due to an underground mine fire. All of the people had to be relocated. I was really intrigued by the digital presence of this place, and the stories of the people who had to move and all of the metaphors and foreshadowing that I saw loaded into this story of Centralia. So a lot of my creative process has to do with history or different stories as well.

I was particularly struck by your visual poem, “Women Making a Scene” — can you talk more about that?

That poem began with an interest in emotional display roles; that is the way that society deems that certain people can or can’t express emotion. I was really intrigued by the gender roles at play and emotional expression in contemporary American society. When are women and girls allowed to express joy? When are we allowed to express anger? And when are those expressions deemed too much? Or, if you will, making a scene? And when does one need to make a scene? And who gets to put that label on it? So I had all of those things mulling about in my brain, and I just kept returning to that phrase “making a scene.” And I thought, well, what if we made it quite literally where you use the stage design diagram and make a scene as a writer that explores the same topics and its contents? I thought that if I’m the one literally determining the scene, that gives a little bit of agency back. I’m the stage designer who gets to put everything in place, instead of other people telling us when you can and cannot express these emotions.

What brought you to Oberlin specifically?

It’s so rare to have a program devoted just to creative writing. I admire that Oberlin approaches creative writing as something that’s just as rigorous as studio art or acting or dance. I was also really thrilled to return to a conservatory setting, and to return to this setting where there’s so many musicians, and there’s also so many writers who are eager to interact with one another. 

How do you hope to get more involved at Oberlin?

I’ve been so invigorated by the interdisciplinarity involved in everything here. I would love to teach a StudiOC cluster or be involved with other programs to think about what it could mean to be a collaborative poet. We often think of poetry as a solitary act — you’re in your studio or your office and you’re writing away, and there’s nobody else. Oberlin is such a vibrant place that I wonder what would happen if we put all of us together — if we wrote poems that were then taken by a composer who sets them to music, or if we worked with TIMARA to make some kind of poem installation? I think there’s so many opportunities here at Oberlin for collaboration.

Do you have any advice for beginner writers?

One of the best pieces of advice I got from a composition instructor, which has translated into poetry, was that whenever you’re trying to write something in a particular genre, listen to or read the exact opposite of what you’re trying to accomplish. What happened in my practice was that in reading the opposite of what I wanted, it gave me permission to explore new avenues in my work. Going to opposite ends of the spectrum can show you the range of what’s out there. And you can make an informed decision about where your poetic practice might lead you. It’s not always about having the magnum opus. It’s about engaging with the process.

I know you were a Physics major in college; what got you into writing fiction?

I had a very influential professor of literature whose honors seminar I took as an undergrad. He was an extremely powerful thinker, and the amount of insight that he could draw out of a text was so impressive. This idea that storytelling was deep and rich, and deeply illuminating about the tellers and listeners, that was all very seductive to me. While I did have very specific skills — I was very good in math and problem solving and analytical tasks — I also took a great deal of pleasure out of connecting things, out of getting a big picture. 

You spent some time living abroad in Thailand and then in the Netherlands. How do you think that’s impacted your writing?

The act of writing is the attempt to see the world from perspectives that aren’t yours, and that’s also what traveling and living in other places does. The moment that you are displaced from your own culture and your own comforts and your own set of assumptions into a place that operates by very different rules and according to very different values, you have to completely rethink what you believe about the world, and it makes you see yourself in a different light. When I moved to Thailand at the age of 11, I was going from a pretty affluent suburb of Chicago and moving to a city on the other side of the world. All of a sudden, everything that I knew about the world was wrong, and I had to relearn it. When I came back to the States, ostensibly my own country, I was really an outsider at 16. I could move about in that culture, I knew the rules, but I was kind of looking at it from the perspective of somebody who had very different experiences, and I think that’s the first step of being a writer. 

In 2019, you won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for your novel The Overstory. Could you talk about what inspired the novel, and what it’s about?

I was teaching at Stanford University after teaching at the University of Illinois for many years, and living in Silicon Valley, it’s a very intense, very utopian, technologically infatuated culture. To get away from this, Iʼd go up into the Santa Cruz mountains just between Silicon Valley and the Pacific and hike in the forests up there, and many of those set-aside forests were recovering redwood forests. When you see a 1,500-year-old redwood tree that’s older than Charlemagne and that’s as wide as a house and as tall as a football field, it changes your way of thinking about time, and changes your way of thinking about our place in the world and about the agency of life. I was suddenly confronted with the evidence of what we human beings have done to the non-human world, and the evidence of how powerful the non-human world was and how deeply we depended upon it. I think it was that awakening that led to this idea that I could write a book that wasn’t simply about humans, and had non-human characters, and explored this kind of forgotten dramatic reality — that we humans are here by virtue of all the other living things that we share the earth with, and that we’re a relative latecomer. 

In 2017, you wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times titled “Keep America Wild” about Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters and the plans to develop them. How do you think this piece was in conversation with The Overstory?

It was written at a moment where, after some years of gradually learning that we could not dominate and endlessly exploit and defeat the non-human world, we were instead starting to slip backwards into a much more human-exceptionalist and triumphalist and separatist program all over again. This piece was basically trying to oppose that moment, and like The Overstory itself, it was trying to take the long lens and say any species that tries to go it alone is going to end up with the other 99 percent of the world’s species that have already gone extinct.

Since then, you’ve published another novel, Bewilderment. What is it about, and what inspired it?

Bewilderment is the story of a father who is raising a neurodivergent 10-year-old boy by himself after the death of his wife, and the boy suffers from extreme forms of eco-trauma, as I think a lot of young people do. Basically, this is the story of a father who has to acknowledge and tell his son, “Yes, the human world has gone crazy. And no, I don’t know the answer to what to do about that.” It was inspired very specifically by my own experience with young children who were suffering from a bewilderment at the insanity of the way that the industrial world is treating the living world.

Do you think that you play that role as an author, having to bring attention to the climate crisis in a way that won’t freak people out?

In The Overstory, Patricia Westford, who is kind of the moral center of the book, is tasked with giving a speech at a climate conference. She’s wrestling with this idea that she’s expected to say something that’s true and useful and hopeful, not defeatist, not overwhelmed. It’s very, very difficult to juggle those things, and when you write a book, if your intention is at all to describe who we are and where we are and what we’re doing, it’s very difficult to be all those three things. 

What is it about Oberlin that connected with you and made you say, “Yes, I want to be the Oberlin Commencement speaker”?

I have had numerous friends who are Oberlin grads who have played a role in my own formation and the formation of my own understanding of the world, as a young person and even in middle age and now in old age. My own novels have been so deeply tied up with American history and the crises of American histories, the various wars for realization and liberation of the marginalized and oppressed populations in this country, and Oberlin has been very much at the forefront of those struggles for a long time.

I’m very excited about giving the speech, and it was a chance for me to go back and remember what it was like for me to be 21 or 22 and graduating from college. It was just a real pleasure to go back and try to recall that as precisely as possible, and try to think of what words might have been useful to me to hear at that moment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What drew you to drag as a performance art?

Itʼs the one thing where you can become anything you want to be. My primary thing is being a storyteller, and what I like about drag is that you can kind of use pop culture, music, and film clips to insert your own voice to tell any story you want. What are the stories that you started out telling with drag and how has that shifted into the stories that you tell today?

When I started, they were more oriented around what I was capable of. At the time, I didnʼt know how to make mixes; I didnʼt know how to do more complex drag looks or costumes. So I was kind of stuck in a space of female impersonation-style drag.

Once I started being able to make mixes, the stories that I could tell changed dramatically. Once I learned how to make props, that really helped add another layer. Learning to make new things and learning new skills helps you start telling the stories you want to tell. One of the numbers that I have analyzed a lot in talking about my career that I think is more indicative of where Iʼm at now is the “Women Who Slay” mix. My “Women Who Slay” mix is based around a metal song by In This Moment, but it has interspersed quotes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It ends with the battle between AON and the Witch King at the very end of it, and Iʼd behead my partner, who is dressed with the witch king head on, to end the whole thing.

I wanted a number that was specifically anti-man, if Iʼm honest. I wanted a number that was about heroes, but I didnʼt want to do the usual goody two-shoes heroes. I wanted to specifically use deadly female assassins who are heroic but who do kill their enemies.

Thatʼs more of the stories Iʼve been telling now — things that to me feel much more directly political, that are much more directly making a statement about either the world or my experience of the world.

You began your academic career as a rock and roll historian. How do you think the culture of rock and roll has influenced your drag?

The stereotypical image of a drag queen is a glamor queen. The idea is very based in white wealth, the fashion industry, or glamor. I donʼt want everything I do to be an easy pill to swallow. A lot of performers, if you talk to them about why they do what they do, one of the things theyʼll say is, “I wanna make the audience happy.” Thatʼs not my goal. I want to make the trans people in my crowd feel seen. I want the women in my crowd to feel seen.

In rock and roll history, the story of women is generally deemphasized because the people who are telling that story are generally men, cis men who are white, who believe that virtuosic guitar skills are the ultimate end-all-be-all of rock music. Thatʼs a lot of stuff I argued against as a rock and roll history specialist, and then I tried to bring those ideas into what I do as a drag performer.

Rock and roll is very political, and being a trans woman, I felt like every other image presented to me by most other trans women in the drag world that I have engaged with has been glamor drag, and I was like, “We as trans women are allowed to be butch too.” Why canʼt I come out here and act like Suzi Quatro?

Could you talk about how you came up with the act you performed on Saturday?

I have been wanting to go and do something like that for a long time. I just didnʼt know how to build it. But the impetus for that came about with this year. I felt the need, rather than just a desire, to create this number because of what is happening with trans and drag-oriented legislation. Seeing that happen made me feel like I wanted to step up as an LGBT activist and do something that was really in your face and really straightforward, where you didnʼt have to think about what the message was.

I made myself a rule years ago that I would never do what I did, which is put signs with words on them. But I just kept thinking, I have to do this number this way because I need people to feel that release — we are all so f*cking angry right now, and I think we need a moment of aggression and rage. I think that we deserve that as trans people.

But I also wanted to provide a hero. I wanted to make it so that I step into this role and pretend that it is this symbol, that we can just knock all these things down and let people feel that we as drag performers are not just going to respond to this in interviews, we are not just going to respond to this in talks, but Iʼm going to do this in my performances. I donʼt really do any of that for cis people at all. I really do that so that trans people feel seen and heard about what is going on for the length of that number.

Doing it in a place where I got to do the talk first was really special for me because it allowed me for once to show an audience how all my work connects. I donʼt usually get to do that.

How has your conceptualization of femininity shifted as youʼve come into your identity as a non-binary trans woman?

I feel that my definition of it has changed as to what Iʼm willing to show and share with people. When I started doing drag in Cleveland, I identified as a straight person. I identified as a boy or genderfluid.

When I started doing drag, my female impersonation-style look, which was all I was taught how to do, made me very dysphoric. It made me feel terrible doing drag because it was like I was putting on the face I wanted to have and then having to take that back off. What I have found over time is that when I switched to the super goth mom look that I have now, it allowed me to feel more like this is a mask that I put on and I take off to become this larger-than-life figure who can say and do these things that I canʼt quite express and do in the world. Having that happen allowed me to feel and start reckoning with who is under the mask.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Following Mahsa Amini’s killing, there have been massive demonstrations in Iran. Since then, you’ve published several essays for The Atlantic on this topic. How can writing be used as a tool for social change? 

An excellent place to begin is to look at where we are in society. There’s been a great deal of division and violence within our country, within the United States, and also generally a great deal of loneliness. So many of us are managing by ourselves and alone. It brings up a larger question of whether we have been able to bring meaning into our lives. We need to find causes that mean a great deal to us, and we can organize our own sense of self around them. As a woman, one of the questions I ask myself and encourage other women to ask is: What happened to feminism? Feminism used to be the thing to do. Women had a great deal to offer the world regarding what it means to have gender equality. In all of the societies around the world, what happened to it? I have a lot of answers as to what happened to feminism, but let’s not go there. There are a great deal of women who have risen up. Iran has come together and given us a reason to come together again as women. The idea of choice is such an important and familiar issue. We have to remember that women have a choice too. It’s about the choice of whether to keep a child or not and the choice of what they can and cannot wear in public. As women everywhere, we fight for choice, whether it’s about what to do with a fetus or what to do with one’s clothes. I think, for many reasons, it’s important to embrace this cause at this moment.

As a native speaker of Farsi, you’ve published collections of Persian poetry. What is the main difference between creative writing and journalistic writing?

I don’t see journalism and creative writing as being different. To me, all writing is about being creative. There’s nothing uncreative about it. When creating a poem, you have to think about the human story and what aspect you are trying to articulate. I’ve been thinking a lot about how you make something that’s not exactly shiny and not obvious to others in terms of its significance, and through poetry and journalism, you can make it relevant to others. That’s the fundamental challenge for me in writing. We can look into obscure but significant matters through lyricism and reporting.

How has your upbringing as a religious minority changed your view of the world? 

When you are the majority, you grow up very comfortable, and that sense of comfort isn’t conducive to being an artist. Being in the minority, there’s always something that bothers you, and sometimes I describe it as an “itchy sweater.” You don’t want to take it off and can’t figure out why it isn’t as comfortable as it should be. If there has been an advantage to being a Jewish person in a Muslim-majority country, it’s that I’ve always asked serious questions. Starting as a young child, I’ve wondered “Who am I? Do I belong? What is belonging? Do I really want to belong?”

Your most recent book, A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious, depicts many immigrant experiences. What motivated you to write this book?

The book disguises itself as a memoir, but it is ultimately a book for native-born Americans, so they are able to see what the immigrant sees. Those born in the U.S. assume everything is a part of the social decor. Well, it isn’t. People misunderstand that an immigrant isn’t just someone who picks our fruits and staffs our hospitals. This book shows small things like different traffic laws that everyone believes in and abides by. These small things are a product of a social contract, so the book is an opportunity for Americans to see the perspective of those who haven’t been born here. Donald Trump has said a few things that really shook me up. He said, “Our country is full,” and that we shouldn’t allow people into this country without specialized skills. I’ve looked at his criteria and realized that I would have never gotten in if he had been president when I came to the U.S. I came as an 18-year-old high school graduate with only a backpack and no English. If Donald Trump had been president then, my destiny wouldn’t be what it is today. I’ve felt that I’ve had to justify why letting someone like me into this country is an excellent decision.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You grew up in Lorain, and now you’re working here in Oberlin. Do you think the communities that you’ve lived and worked in have influenced your work in government and art?

Yeah, definitely in one way or another. We kind of all just build off our experiences. I feel like it’s getting better now, but when I was growing up, art really wasnʼt something that was readily accessible or encouraged. I remember, when I was in high school, actually being discouraged from taking art classes. Now, in this position, I have the opportunity to go a different direction and guide things more —like with the last project we did with the Black History Month banners. Projects that engage local students and the young people by giving them access to art and opportunities are only beneficial for a community. So Iʼm glad that I could bring that side of things to the City of Oberlin, because there are things that I didnʼt have growing up that I wish I had.

Why do you think art is so important to a community?

I think that art is important because it can be so many things to so many different people. For me, I talk about the conceptual side of things and working through these ideas or problems that affect my life. But also, it could be something like, “This is beautiful and it brings me joy.” It can mean so much to so many different people, and I donʼt know of anything else that does that. I think that the ability to create art is beneficial for everyone. I think to be able to bring those opportunities to the community is golden. You have an opportunity to hone skills, or look at things in a different way, or use it as therapy, like I do. It’s a way of getting out what you canʼt get out otherwise, and I think doing that through creative means is very unique.

What kind of role do you think art does or should play in the Oberlin community?

Everything. Art is everything, right? If I wasn’t an art major, I couldn’t do the majority of the things that I’m doing in my job. Itʼs that ability to not only create, but also think in a creative manner to come up with new solutions to problems.

Working in a small government, it’s different every day. New problems arise, and you have to have the ability to think critically and think creatively to better the lives that you serve. I think thatʼs something that I learned as an art major. I want to bring that to any community I serve, wherever I land.

What do you see as major obstacles to the accessibility of arts in Oberlin?

Just generally speaking, the perception of art as not being valuable is a problem everywhere. But I think in Oberlin, maybe itʼs more of not knowing how to take advantage of it.

We have so much here. And outside of Oberlin, people think of Oberlin as this great arts community, but itʼs not so much shining here as I feel it should be. We have an amazing museum here. We have Oberlin College. We have these galleries downtown and all of these incredible resources. They’re just not as promoted as they should be. They’re not as accessible as they should be. I think thatʼs been an obstacle, and you need someone or some organization to champion those types of efforts. Iʼm trying — Iʼm doing the best I can. I think that thereʼs more work to be done, but I think having that recognition that there is so much here — thereʼs so much potential for our community to shine as an arts hub, and Iʼm working to do that.

You mentioned you worked on the Black History Month portrait contest. Will we be seeing more projects like that bringing art to the community?

We’re hoping to! One of the things that we’re building on this year and hoping to do is the Black History project. I think everybody involved in it was like, “Yes, we need to do this every year,” so thatʼs going to continue.

One of the other things that we are putting together now is we are partnering with Firelands Association for the Visual Arts to grant funding for mural projects in the downtown business district. Thatʼs one of the things that weʼve heard, that thereʼs interest in these visual arts elements downtown. Moneyʼs always an issue, so thatʼs the resource we are able to provide.

Since we’re the government, we donʼt necessarily want to be in the business of selecting art downtown, so we’re fortunate to have an organization like FAVA right in our community that has those resources and can put together selection panels and work with artists and art in mind. It’s a pilot program this year, so we will have that evaluation at the end of the year, and hopefully we can keep that going and see that expand.

I’ll give you one other thing that we’re working on this year, though I donʼt have a lot of details yet because we’re still in the idea-building process. We are looking to establish a yearly Art in the Park event, like an Art Fair. We’re still building what the event is going to look like — we definitely want it to be very arts-driven, but also very Oberlin, so we want to work with all the galleries downtown. We want to work with Oberlin College and the Art department there and the Conservatory. We want to bring in the high school art students as well. We want it to be this very Oberlin community, arts-driven, annual event to happen downtown later this year. I think thatʼs one of those attempts to really let all the wonderful arts resources and organizations here shine.