Steam curled from cups of hot tea. Warm introductions and long-awaited reunions drifted through the room. Three poets stood together in the corner of the Michael C. Carlos Museum’s Ackerman Hall — catching up, complimenting each other’s work and preparing for their joint reading, acutely named “Three Poets: A Reading with Victoria Chang, E. Hughes and Lauren K. Watel.”
A few minutes later Deanna Sirlin holding the microphone at the front of the room. Sirlin herself is an artist— a painter and visual creator whose work has been featured in the High Museum. She is also the founder, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Art Section, a 17-year-old arts journal.
Deanna Sirlin, a painter and visual creator from Atlanta, introduced the poets one by one. First, Sirlin introduced Victoria Chang, the current Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Second, she called E. Hughes (27G), a philosophy PhD student at Emory University who studies the intersection of black aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. Lastly, she introduced Lauren K. Watel (96G, 03G), whose first book, “BOOK of POTIONS,” is set to release on Feb. 11.
While an eclectic group, these poets were not a random assortment; they are well-acquainted friends as well as contemporaries. In December, Chang sat down for a conversation with Watel, during which they discussed Chang’s fascination with poetry’s visual power, even just as words on a page.
As Chang ascended to the podium, the crowd murmured in excitement. The attendees were a motley mix — young and old, Emory students and community members. But that night, poetry connected them all.
Chang began her reading by explaining the ekphrastic nature of her recent book, “With My Back to the World: Poems” (2024). Each poem in her collection correlates to individual pieces by Agnes Martin, a 20th-century contemporary artist renowned for the meticulous nature of her geometric abstract paintings. The book’s title poem borrows from Martin’s painting series “With My Back to the World” (1997).
“With My Back to the World” encapsulates Martin’s signature grid style. “The MoMA in New York had commissioned me to write a poem on anything in her collection,” Chang said.
The poem — and all of Chang’s work — explores the pain and beauty of familial relationships, as well as tragedies such as the 2021 Atlanta spa shooting. In her poem, “On a Clear Day,” Chang channels Martin by using a gridlike structure while unpacking the pain caused by the murders.
Ebenezer Agu (30G), who worked with Chang during his MFA in creative writing at the University of Michigan, nodded alongside the poet as she spoke. He found the event by happenstance when his PhD advisor told him that Chang would be reading some of her work.
As a chance to hear Chang discuss her poetic process, Agu thought the event was an opportunity that couldn’t be passed up. Before coming to campus last semester to study in Emory’s English department, Agu founded 20.35 Africa, a poetry journal created to uplift the work of African poets.
“I don’t think I write about a particular thing, but most of the themes I’ve felt like come across in my poetry have had to do with social experiences in suburban areas. And of course, religion and spirituality because I grew up in a very religious home.”
After Chang, E. Hughes took the podium. They began their reading by discussing their family’s Western roots, as well as the largely undocumented history of the Black community in California — citing their own education as lackluster in telling stories of Black people east of the Mississippi River.
“When I began to ask my professors about the African-American population in California, I was often met with silence, and then I would have these memories about my grandparents, about my family, about our pursuits and about our journeys to the Bay, to the beach, Oakland, San Jose,” Hughes said. “I began to put the pieces together that big tech had sort of destroyed all of that history, along with the routine pursuits of anti-blackness.”
According to Hughes, their most recent collection, “Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water: Poems” (2024), uplifts both their history and that of Mary Ellen Pleasant, a 19th-century Black abolitionist who helped solidify California’s Underground Railroad.
“Allegedly she was born in Georgia on the plantation, and she said a smart remark to a white man asking for directions,” Hughes said. “He thinks she’s so clever that he buys her because he thinks she’s too smart for slavery and sends her North to learn to read.”
For Hughes, their collection is a protest against the erasure of Black history and the “routine pursuits against Anti-blackness.”
“This book — “Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water”— was my attempt to try to say that we were there, no longer here, but we were Black women standing ankle deep in Pacific water,” Hughes said.
Watel, who has a PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Emory, was last to read. Her poetry focuses on the “smaller, more goofy probing of family” and her relationships with her family and with herself. Discussing her creative process, Watel compared her writing process to running a race.
“You race and you stretch and you race, and what you want to do is finish the run — you don’t even think the stretching is anything,” Watel said. “The writing I do is like the stretching. I didn’t think it was anything but it somehow was helping me.”
When Watel’s reading concluded, the crowd roared with applause. One of these cheerers was Judith Winfrey, founder of the nationally recognized Love is Love Cooperative Farm in Mansfield, Ga. Winfrey sees poetry as a conduit for goodness and “affirming our beliefs and values.”Explaining why she attended the event, Winfrey elaborated on how basking in Atlanta’s poetic community gives her a reprieve from the rapid changes in American society.
“I’m here because I’m interested in poetry broadly, and in this moment, I’m very interested in things that will distract me from politics and remind me of humanity,” Winfrey said.
Hunter is a freshman from Georgia. He loves writing about music, politics, and public education. In his free time, Hunter plays piano, runs, and spends far too long crafting Spotify playlists.
