In the Spotlight: Taylor Byas on Her Award-Winning Poems, Pursuing Ph.D. in Poetry, and the Release of Her Debut Chapbook “Bloodwarm”
Taylor Byas is a true poetic force. Not only is the Cincinnati-based poet and essayist currently a Ph.D. student studying poetry and editing writing for various outlets, but she is also about to release her debut chapbook Bloodwarm through Variant Literature at the beginning of July. Her collection “explores what it’s like to live in a Black body that is constantly scrutinized and dissected beneath the white gaze” with poems that are shattering yet fiercely powerful.
I spoke with Byas via Google Docs about her award-winning poems and fiction writing, working towards her Ph.D. in poetry, social media (the good and bad), and her upcoming chapbook Bloodwarm.
Erica Abbott: First of all, congratulations on your upcoming chapbook! Can you tell me about how the collection came to be, how you landed on the title, and what you hope readers get from it?
Taylor Byas: Thank you so much! I’m so excited for this chapbook to make its way out into the world, because I think the poems in it are so important. The poems in this chapbook were largely a part of a full-length manuscript I was putting together a while ago. And I realized that the manuscript was beginning to split into two separate projects, one being this collection of poems that really speak to racism and what it’s like to be a Black woman in this country. The title comes from the final poem in the collection, and so within the context of that poem, the reader can sort of glean an understanding of “bloodwarm.” But for me, “bloodwarm” is a state of being, a sort of weather in which Black people are always existing. No matter where we are, the heat of a mob is never far, and perhaps that’s the loudest thing this collection is saying.
EA: Do you have a favorite poem from the collection? What is it about/can you share a snippet of it?
TB: My favorite poem from the collection is probably my poem “I Don’t Care If Mary Jane Gets Saved Or Not.” So much about this poem (from it being inspired by Spiderman, to the fact that it’s a pantoum, and finally just the kick ass voice of it) makes me return to it even as I write new poems and consider how to use form and punctuation to my advantage. This poem is already published in print, but I did share it on my Twitter page here. I started thinking about superhero movies and the damsel-in-distress figure, and how the superhero is always saving white women. And if the Black woman isn’t good enough to be saved, what does that make us? This poem seeks to answer that question, running through both Spiderman references and real-life instances of white women terrorizing Black people. I’m also incredibly proud of the ending. The ending line is the beginning line repeated, and in the beginning we just get “I can’t lie, I tried to imagine myself / in Spiderman’s grip” and at the end, the final line is “I can’t lie. I tried to imagine, myself.” That comma does so much lifting by the end. Probably the best comma I’ve ever placed.
EA: What is your writing routine like? Have you found anything specific that works best for you?
TB: I honestly don’t have much of a routine. As I write the response to this very question, I think it’s been about a month since I’ve written anything that wasn’t a blurb or something for someone else. For me, I just have to write when I get the urge to write for the most part. I’m often collecting ideas, titles, lines, and images in the Notes app on my phone, and then when I get that pull to put something to the page, I sit down and work it out. And when I do that, I usually can get out a full draft. I can force myself to be more disciplined. I’ve successfully completely 30/30s with friends and I’ve come out of those months with 30 separate and complete new poem drafts, and those times have been really great for just generating a TON of material and seeing if any threads pop up or seeing if the beginning of a new project is peaking its head out. But what consistently works for me is letting the poem come to me when it’s ready. Trusting that can be hard sometimes, but it always pays off.
EA: What made you want to pursue your Ph.D. in poetry? What do you love most about it that keeps you so dedicated to the craft?
TB: I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in poetry for job market reasons (they say it’s supposed to make you more competitive), but I also wanted the time to write and sharpen my craft. I’d only really been writing poetry seriously for two years before I started the Ph.D., and I wanted time to learn and read more, to figure out what was important to me. The thing I love about the Ph.D. is the way that it provides space for my creative and academic interests to collide (I say academic instead of scholarly, because poetry IS scholarship, amen?) For example, for my exam year, I have the opportunity to study how Black women poets have used both the erotic and wordplay as means of poetic resistance. Of course, as I study these poets, inspiration will bleed into my own work, and my own work already falls into this category in a lot of ways. By learning more about these women’s writing, I’m learning more about my own. How often do we get time to dedicate to just learning and reading in this way? It’s such a gift to my writing, and just a gift to be allowed to dig into writers I admire, and to talk about writing with intelligent writers and careful, sharp readers.
EA: When you’re reading/editing for The Rumpus or The Cincinnati Review what do you really look for in a submission? What makes a good story to you?
TB: I will never shut up about the importance of surprise. Sometimes I read things that are pretty strong pieces, but ultimately they aren’t saying things in a way that I haven’t seen before. And of course, when you’re selecting things for publications that get a significant amount of submissions, things really have to stand out for acceptance. So something often needs to surprise me in some way. Perhaps the author is using language in a really unique way, or their word choices are exceptional. It might be that the voice is just leading me through the poem or story in a way that’s riveting. There might be a narrative twist that I just didn’t see coming, but completely elevates the piece. When I’m surprised, I get really excited.
EA: You’ve won both the 2020 Poetry Super Highway Contest and the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets for two stunningly devastating yet captivating poems. How did these two poems come to be?
TB: My pantoum that won the Poetry Super Highway Contest was written during a formal 30/30 that I did with friends! We made a big google folder and created a calendar with different forms for each day, and I wrote “The Black Girl Comes To Dinner” on one of my pantoum days. I wrote “South Side” almost exactly a month after that pantoum, because I was still in such a formal poetic headspace and wanted to challenge myself to write something longer and more sustained. Some poems I’m really lucky to strike right on the first try, and both of these poems fall into that category. Other than some really minor punctuation or singular word changes, those poems haven’t really changed from their first drafts. But form does that for me, it forces me to get things much tighter on the first try because there’s a box I have to fit everything into. Yet another reason I love it.
EA: Your piece “On Hesitation” was also selected as a Best Microfiction winner this year. I understand you started out writing fiction? What do you love about this form and what drove the shift to poetry for you?
TB: I love storytelling, I love narrative. And narrative doesn’t escape my poetry either. I did start out as a fiction student in undergrad, taking mostly fiction classes and doing pretty well in them. I still love writing fiction, I just don’t dedicate much time to it these days. But at the end of my undergraduate career, I took an ekphrastic poetry course. I had to basically create a story for these paintings and images that we were studying and make poems out of them. And I think that class was just the perfect storm for me to fall in love with poetry. The combination of narrative and the heightened attention to language just pulled me RIGHT on in. And even when I was writing fiction, I think my writing still aired more on the poetic side, so I think the transition was a natural waiting to happen. After that semester ended and I finished undergrad, I switched over to poetry for my Masters degree, and here I am!
EA: How does social media/online presence play into what you do as a poet? Your poem “My Twitter Feed Becomes Too Much” appears in your upcoming chapbook and shows the devastating/overwhelming side of it all. Then, on the flipside, your popular tweet about how “men be menning” eventually turned into a sonnet crown about dating apps. Is poetry how you try to make sense of it all or would you do without it if you could? Could you detail these two different experiences a bit?
TB: Social media and your online presence is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to being a poet. I say it’s a blessing because so many opportunities have found their way to me because of my social media and online presence (one of them being my agent), and there are just so many things that wouldn’t have happened to me when they did if it weren’t for Twitter. It’s a curse because sometimes it can be really harmful and toxic, and I think “My Twitter Feed Becomes Too Much” is a perfect example of that dynamic. Social media traps you because there’s a desire to stay connected, to be in the know, but lord knows what you may encounter in the process. Social media also feels so necessary. As a poet especially, when it comes to our work (from an individual poem level all the way to a book level) we have to do most of the hustling to get our work out there. We are our biggest marketers and publicists in a lot of cases, and social media has become so integrated into our lives that it’s really hard to separate from it. But since I do feel like it’s a necessary evil, I definitely make the best out of it and have fun. I also love talking about serious things in a fun and silly way, and “men be menning” falls into that category. Poetry is definitely a way to process and think more deeply about those conversations I’m having at a surface level on social media (because let’s be honest, Twitter is not the place for deep conversations and nuance). The “Men Be Menning” sonnet crown is a manifestation of that processing.
EA: You’ve gotten to do some incredible poetry readings—who are your top three poets you would want to read with if given the opportunity? Who would you love to read with you during a featured reading?
TB: It is a dream of mine to read with Patricia Smith, she is probably one of my biggest heroes and inspirations. I would love to get to read in the same space as Claudia Rankine. Eve L. Ewing is another that would be a dream. I have so many poets that I’d love to read with me for a featured reading, I couldn’t possibly fit them all into a list. But also, I do plan to ask some of them to read with me for Bloodwarm events, so I want to keep it a bit of a secret. And I hope that they say yes!
EA: Now that the country is starting to open back up, what are some of your must-do’s personally and professionally in the coming months?
TB: More than anything, I want to meet some of my virtual friends in-person. I’ve already started to meet some people and it’s brought me so much joy. I also just can’t wait to get back on a physical stage sometime soon.
EA: Do you have any other projects on the horizon? Anything else you’d like to add that I didn’t ask?
TB: I’m working on a second full-length manuscript currently, and I’ve also just started a short story YA collection (why do I do this to myself). Also have some other projects in the works that I can’t quite talk about yet, but I hope that I can talk about them soon!
I also just want to say thank you for talking to me and for this opportunity! It is always a gift when people spend time with my work and relate and/or connect with something I write. I am forever grateful for this writing life, for the people who see my work and who see me.
Taylor Byas is a Black poet and essayist. Originally from Chicago, she moved to Alabama for six years, where she received both her Bachelor’s degree in English and her Master’s degree in English (Creative Writing concentration) from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Taylor currently lives in Cincinnati, Ohio where she is a second year PhD student and Albert C. Yates Scholar at the University of Cincinnati studying poetry. She is also a reader for The Cincinnati Review, and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She has received five Pushcart and six Best of the Net nominations, and has won a Best Microfiction Award. She is also the 1st Place Winner of both the 2020 Poetry Super Highway Contest and the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets, and a finalist for the 2020 Frontier OPEN Prize. Her chapbook, BLOODWARM, is forthcoming from Variant Lit (2021).
About the Interviewer
Erica Abbott (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based poet and writer whose work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Serotonin, FERAL, Gnashing Teeth, Selcouth Station, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other journals. She is the author of Self-Portrait as a Sinking Ship (Toho, 2020), her debut poetry chapbook. She volunteers for Button Poetry and Mad Poets Society. Follow her on Instagram @poetry_erica and on Twitter @erica_abbott and visit her website here.
