Faison’s poetry and prose have appeared in acclaimed literary publications, such as Callaloo, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, West Trestle Review, Artemis, RHINO, Aunt Chloe, About Place Journal, Southern Poetry Anthology, Stonecoast Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, and Virginia’s Best Emerging Poets. Her work is also featured in notable volumes such as Three Minus One and the NAACP Image Award-winning Keeping the Faith. Faison is the author of numerous poetry collections including Mother to Son, LOVE POEMS, and the Amazon Kindle best-selling trilogy 28 Days of Poetry Celebrating Black History. She is also the author of the historical study The Missed Education of the Negro: An Examination of the Black Segregated Experience in Southampton County, VA, and children’s books Kendall’s Golf Lesson and 100 Poems You Can Write. Faison has received multiple honors, including the Tom Howard Poetry Prize. She has been a finalist for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Louise Bogan Poetry Award, North Street Book Prize, Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, and others. A Veteran Military Spouse and proud mother of three sons, Faison has served on the faculty of various colleges and universities throughout the US as well as abroad—wherever military duty called. She holds Life Membership in The Poetry Society of Virginia, College Language Association, and the historic Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book was a small chapbook collection of poems, entitled Poetically Speaking. It allowed me to see what was possible. Holding a book in your hand with your name on it is powerful, inspiring. I sold over 250 copies of that chapbook, which helped to finance the self-publication of my first book collection, Secrets of My Soul. That book changed my life in that the world around me recognized me as an author, a poet. I was invited to my hometown to do a reading and book signing the local community college. The people showed up in support of it, and they enjoyed the poems. That was assuring, life changing. The people at home, my family, friends, teachers, and community had always had faith in me, supported me. They showed up, purchased books, told their friends and family about it, and the rest was history. Book number one made book number two a reality. You can write books. You can sell books. But neither are worthwhile without readers. That first book established my audience—the fact that I could even have an audience—and in essence, it changed my life.
I don’t think my initial work, my first book, quite compares to my most recent work or this last book collection. The passion for the poetry was there in the beginning and the dedication to learning the craft, but my world has changed so much then. The world we know has changed in so many ways, for better and for worse. How could I ignore it? So much has changed since that first book. In the first book, I was writing out of adolescence and girlhood, a sort of early becoming, seemingly with a little naivete and a lot less experience. I was a new, young wife, living on love, a new mother, a new military spouse, a college graduate. In my most recent book, I’m writing out of the old-fashioned wisdom not only passed down but called on in times of trouble. I’m writing out of two decades of coming to full grip and reality with systemic racism, racial inequality, gender inequality, societal capitalism, religious hypocrisy, and having raised our own young Black sons through two eras just as terrorizing to Black males as Jim Crow. My latter work has been a labor of love and war, joy and pain, awareness, and necessary family, community, nation-building. If we don’t teach and pass down our own history, who will do it for us. The children must know the ways of the elders, how they made it over. My latter work speaks to the woman I have become; it is a credit to the strong women who have defined me. It tells a story. Nursery Rhymes in Black is an act of amplifying Black voices—the elders, the mama’s, the fathers, the sons, and the daughters. It’s historic, cultural, identifying, and shifting.
I don’t like to compare the work because the one exists because of the other; they each have their places and purpose. But it does indeed feel different because it is different. My first book felt nice, easy, inviting, calm, but strong, assuring, accommodating and bold even. My latter work feels more prolific yet inspiring, intentional, radical yet creative, aggressive yet inviting, demanding yet collaborative, lyrical, telling, epic, and historic. There’s something ancestral, mature, and grown-up about the poems I’ve been writing. Nursery Rhymes in Black is a collection that marks time, documents history, calls readers to lean in, listen, to give history and my people attention. I wasn’t necessarily commanding these kinds of things in my first book, Secrets of My Soul. I was finding my way, sharing my soul intimately, introducing my voice to the world in a shy kind of way. In these recent works, I have lost all shyness. I am grabbing the mic, owning my feelings, thoughts, and ideas. I’m standing center stage on the page and confronting so much, everything, using the everyday lives of people I knew and loved. Their stories mattered; their lives mattered. That’s it. I’m telling stories, documenting history in my recent work. There’s an homage to my upbringing and those who brought me up—all those experiences culminating in the sum total of me. I was likely painting pictures and finding myself, my voice in my first collection. In fact, the title poem read “Dare me to pursue this / to pen the secrets of my soul / in father time’s precious ink royal black and memory gold.” There’s a difference; there’s an innocence. I was born in that first book. I have come of age in this last one with lines that must be reckoned with, “Like three blind mice, three white churches stand watch covering blood shed by white hoods: one for their fathers, one for their sons, one for their holy ghosts.” I don’t mince words or hide behind facades in the latter work. I bring it, without hesitation. What I may not have said over twenty-five years ago, I have to say it now. So much has happened in the in between years. Life demands the poetry that I now write.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Nothing has had more influence on my life than the historical literary and musical tradition that is rooted and grounded in the Church, the Black church, the Black Baptist church—it’s music, its liturgical, ecclesiastical, oratorical, and theological ways, means, vibes, logos, love ballads, shouts, hollers, and spirituals.
I came to poetry by way of the Black church. I remember holding the Bible and The Baptist Hymnal in my hands as early as I can remember and following along in Sunday School, Sunday morning worship services, Bible studies, and vacation Bible schools in summer with the words of scriptures, prayers, praise songs, hymns, chants, Negro spirituals.
Scriptures and songs were my introduction to poetry and old deacons and church mothers’ well-rehearsed and memorized prayers. I memorized so many. I fell in love with the ebb and flow of the words, with the rhythms, the rhyme, with the spirituality of it all, it was amazing, the most amazing thing I’d ever read or heard or learned or fathomed at those very young tender, teachable moments in my life. I mastered them.
This is how I came to poetry. It drew me—the voice of god, a savior—the lyrics of so many songs inspired by god or written to and about god; it was hypnotic for sure, healing, comforting, hopeful, believable—the absolute best therapy and coping mechanism ever for my little young, Black self, the best EVER. So, it was poetry from day one, and later the poetry became nonfiction. I don’t play around much with fiction. I love truth. It saves. It heals. It delivers. It liberates. It’s not easy, but it’s freedom.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It can take anywhere from a minute to years. My writing projects are not usually things that I’ve started, not my poetic ones anyway. My dissertation, of course, was a project that I had to plan, start, finish, and deliver. The poetry doesn’t must happen in that way, whether it’s a single poem or an entire collection. I’d much rather write poems that come to me than to have a poem commissioned. I like to write what I feel, and you have to feel things and then be free enough to write about them. Over the years, when I worked less, writing was easier; there was more time. As my children became older and life became busier, more demanding, I have found it harder to find time to write, to finish projects. My best poems have come when there has been time—time to feel all the things that I want to capture and deliver in a poem, time to travel back in time or think far into my future about what is, what was, and what could be. My grandmother passed in 2008; the poem I wanted to write for her didn’t come until about three to four years later. I didn’t want her poem to be something I wrote in a few minutes, day, or a month even. “Mama was a Negro Spiritual” was a poem I pieced together just like a quilt. It came in patches, in pieces, in figments of my memory and imaginings. For my grandmother, a poem had to be grand. In the end, it was. It was award-winning. So, it’s a slow process because I like it to be. But sometimes words, phrases, they come quickly, and I jot them down, save them up—they are the patches, the pieces, that ultimately come together in the end. First drafts, second drafts, and sometimes un-trackable numbers of drafts appear. I often know how I want a poem to look but most importantly how I want it to feel, and that’s what I long to master in the final shape and draft of many of my poems, all of my work. The end is important. Through notes on napkins, notepads, in my phone texts, or digital notepads and messages, they are worked out and pieced together in my head and on paper and via computer. It’s a magic that happens, a poem coming together.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Poems, for me, can begin with a single word or a phrase that I love. They can also begin with a moment, a line from a book or movie or even a conversation. I write short pieces and long pieces. I think my best falls somewhere in between. In my early writing, I wrote many pieces that came together without really thinking of themed collections; they were general collections. Today, I write on various themes and subjects (as Phillis Wheatley’s first collection), but with more of a theme in mind when writing for collections or calls for submissions and prizes. I don’t necessarily think of a book from the beginning of a poem. But I do have book ideas. There are kinds of poetry books that I’d love to write, various kinds. I must find the time, take the time, make the time.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I have been a public speaker since I was a child. My love for reading in public, like my love for poetry, was also formed in the Black church. I was tasked with reading scriptures and leading songs, publicly, as a kid. I don’t mind it at all. I like it even. It comes easy for me. Some have said I’m a natural. So, to read my work is natural, to read or recite my poems and talk about them, that’s not necessarily a part of it, and it’s certainly not counter to the creative process. I don’t write a poem or a book with the intent to publicly read it (thought I now know that comes with the territory), but I mostly write for me first. There’s some freedom and deliverance in writing and publishing for me. Secondly, it’s to be read and to inspire or help heal or educate others, to enlighten. I am a storyteller at heart, and even my poems tell stories. So, they don’t have to be read by me. If they are read, that’s enough. But I don’t mind public readings. There’s a dance that can happen between reader or author and audience, poet, and people. The interaction usually always leads to some amazing, wonderfully engaging, or powerful experience in itself.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I don’t set out to have theoretical concerns behind my writing, but I know they are there. I’m a Black woman writing. Race in America is political. Gender in America is political. If it’s political, it’s theoretical. I am concerned about Black life, womanhood, the underprivileged, the voiceless, hypocrisy, the evil men do in society—those are my concerns. I am not so much trying to answer questions as I am telling a story, testifying, documenting life, history, and times of people, places, and ideas. I think that we should all be asking the questions that will cause us to work harder to make life better. Questions engage. Questions inspire critical thought. We need more questions, more critical thinking, more engagement, more change, more solutions, more kindness, compassion, more understanding. I’m interested in why we do what we do and to whom we do it, and why. It’s circular. It’s systemic. It’s layered. Everybody has a story; everybody’s story is important. I tell mine and many of the stories I know, via poetry, nonfiction, narrative.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The writer has always had a responsibility to take readers, the public, on a journey, down a road, for a ride—the responsibility of giving one a glimpse into a life and/or time they’ve never known or may not be fully aware of. Writers have the role of teaching, providing escape, enlightenment, entertainment, simulation, rhetorical analysis, theorizing. Writers wake us, take us, and catapult us into other worlds where we can be better. The writing must be, should be, an experience, that changes one for the better. That’s the role of the writer in larger cultural. As an African American woman writer, I carry the responsibility of cultural analysis and critic, ethnographer, truth teller, revealer.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it’s both difficult and essential, working with outside editors, depending on the editor(s). I enjoy working alone, writing alone, going it alone and having it edited in the end. I don’t think I’d like writing in tandem with an editor. Editors are very necessary for the professional reputation and readability of the work. I don’t write novels. I gather that editors could be crucial in the various stages of novel writing. I’ve self-published for nearly three decades for a reason. I don’t like the idea of having one’s work validated by others, and sometimes that is what happens in relationships with some editors. Editors have control, and I believe writers should be in control of their material. Advice is great, but I think a good editor knows that and knows there should be a line drawn.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
It hasn’t been one single piece of advice but a compilation of so many pieces of advice: Don’t try to write like anyone else. Write what you know Write what you imagine. Write the kind of books you want to read. Write the books you have not read. Write for your own self first. Tell your truth. Tell your story. If you want to be a writer, be a reader. “To thine own self be true.” Never give up. You can do it.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It has gotten easier over the years to move between the genres of poetry and nonfiction. My prose often becomes poetic or lyrical, and my poetry often becomes narrative. It’s certainly becoming easier with time.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t have a writing routine. I write when I one. I mostly do it, “when the spirit hits me.” I don’t write at certain times of the day or any particular way. I am a night owl, always have been. I will steal a moment anywhere to write words, phrases, lines . . . that later become poems. I am always open to and looking for reasons to write, people, places, and things or ideas about which to write. I love to document what I see and feel and hear. That’s the only routine I have, paying attention to life and feeling all of the feelings it brings—capturing those feelings in poems, essays, or whatever.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing gets stalled or when I feel there’s a block, I keep living. I read, watch tv, pay attention to what’s going on in my home, my community, my state, organizations, globally. Things are happening to people, good and bad, every moment. Every moment there is something terrible or amazing happening, things that bring joy and pain. That always pulls me back into the game; it brings me back to poetry, writing. I am called to respond. So, I just keep living, and eventually, something draws me to the page, summons me to get in the game and get busy writing.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The scent watermelon, the smell of freshly cut grass, and the aroma of soul foods, especially sweets—reminds me of home, family, my grandparents who raised me. I grew up in the country. My grandma was an amazing cook. My grandfather was an outdoorsman with a beautiful garden. My other grandmother lived just down the road—her sweet potato pies where out of this world.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science, or visual art?
Everything I see and hear, taste, smell, or feel influences my work. McFadden is probably right. But books also come from experience. Poetry is experience. Music is an experience. It influences my work. Trauma is experience; it influences my work. People influence my work. Places influence my work. Circumstances, things . . . everything influences my work. And yes, books have influenced my works and so have movies, tv shows, documentaries, entertainers, historical figures, people long gone have influenced my work. I have written poems in response to nature, music, science, art, you name it. Poetry is an experience, a response.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There are absolutely too many writers or writings to name that are important for my work. I am in awe of historical poets and writers and lyricists. I have long been a fan of Langston Hughes' poetry, Phillis Wheatley, Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk, Woodson’s The Miseducation of the Negro, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Angelou’s poetry and iconic Caged Bird, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison’s poetry and cadre of works from The Bluest Eye to Song of Solomon and SULA, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls, August Wilson’s places, especially Fences, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker’s For My People, Mari Evans, Nikki Giovanni’s poetry, Sonia Sanchez, the late Val Gray Ward, voice of the Black writer and founder of Chicago’s Kuumba Theater.
In the last six years, I’ve come to know and love so many contemporary African American scholars, poets, and writers. I am completely in awe of the work of poets Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, Danez Smith, Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, Tracy K. Smith, Sharan Strange, poets who formed The Dark Room Collective. I have found so many new friends and sisters in this work as well through Furious Flower Poetry Center: Joanne Gabbin, Lauren Alleyne, the Wintergreen Women, Nikki Giovanni, Trudier Harris, Daryl Cumber Dance, Maryemma Graham, Meta DuEwa Jones, DaMaris Hill, Desiree Cooper, Opal Moore, Ethel Morgan Smith, Hermine Pinson, Renee Watson.
Oh, and I LOVE Ariana Benson, Cedric Tillman, and Remica Bingham-Risher. The work of Joan Kwon Glass, Jamaica Baldwin, Kendra Bryant, Adrienne Christian, Adrienne Oliver, Glenis Redmond, JeMayne King, Darlene Anita Smith, and Judy Juanita. Gabrielle Pina wrote two amazing books that I came across when she joined the faculty at my University. Dr. Ayo Morton, an amazing poet, spoken word artist, writer, and scholar is also a new colleague and sister writer friend. The sisters are writing, and the work is liberating. Then there’s the talented Carmin Wong and gifted Angel Dye, young women, poets, playwrights, spoken word artists, and scholars on fire and on the rise. Avery Young, Chicago’s poet laureate. Jessica Care Moore, Detroit’s poet laureate. The prolific Dominique Christina who is absolute FIRE!! Tony Medina at Howard University. Amazing!
I am surrounded by beautiful people, by women, by beautiful Black writers, artists of all colors and creeds who write powerfully, who are changing worlds like Liseli Fitzpatrick, Alysia Dempsey, and Leah Glenn founder of the Leah Glenn Dance Theater and Dance professor at The College of William & Mary with whom I’ve had the opportunity to perform and collaborate. I could literally go on . . . I have not scratched the surface of all the artists who have engaged me in powerful ways. Durie Harris, Ebony Lumumba, Roxane Gay, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, I love what they are doing in the literary world. In fact, I’ve left somebody out of this group of amazing writers who inspire me, and I’m sorry. But I am blessed to be in the company of some of the greatest writers who have ever lived. I just met Imani Perry for the first time at a retreat. She is doing phenomenal work. Oh, and my goodness . . . poets Anastacia Renee, JP Howard, Cynthia Manick, Regina YC Garcia. The future is in good hands.
Some great poets and writers have graced the Earth, left the Earth, but they have left us with their words, and I am daily inspired by poets and writers who are both ancestors and contemporaries. We have inherited an African American literary tradition and legacy that has kept us, sustained us, and these people are doing the work good, one poem, one play, one article, one novel, one book at a time. I am happy to be a benefactor, happy to be a part of it all, happy to continue such a great literary tradition.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a play. Write a novel. Write memoir. Edit a new anthology. Write my life story, or some of my mom’s. Hers is an episodic thriller—s.h.i.t. that sells, for sure (smile). See some of my work on the big screen someday, that’s a dream!
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I’d like to have my own talk show, perhaps radio or podcasting. Had I not been an academic, a poet, a writer, I’d likely have been a good engineer, pastor, psychiatrist/therapist, or motivational speaker.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Life made me write. Trauma, tragedy, emotions, people, circumstances . . . life made me write; there was nothing else that held or kept or stayed with me like writing. It didn’t cost much to grow as a writer, just time and witness.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book(s) I have read have included Black Pastoral by Ariana Benson, My Mouth a Constant Prayer by Angel Dye, Lot’s Daughters by Opal Moore, Black Girl You Are Atlas by Renee Watson, Bliss by Gabrielle Pina, WORN by Adrienne Christian, What My Hand Say by Glenis Redmond, The Fire Talker’s Daughter by Regina YC Garcia, and Those Who Ride the Night Winds by Nikki Giovanni (for the umpteenth time). I am currently reading What We’ve Become by darlene anita smith, We Be Theorizin by Kendra Bryant Aya, and Side Notes form the Archivist by Anastacia-Renee, and other collections. I read fiction and nonfiction, novels and plays, but I am always reading a poet.
20 – What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on ways to promote my new book, Nursery Rhymes in Black, winner of the 2023 Permafrost Book Prize for poetry published by University of Alaska Press an imprint of University Press of Colorado. I am working on this in addition to stepping into the brand-new role of Dept. Chair of The Languages & Literature Department at Virginia State University. I hope that readers will get the book. It’s available via the publisher as well as online at Amazon and Barnes n’ Noble. I hope that colleges and universities and organizations will invite me to do readings and participate in festivals and conferences or deliver guest lectures. I have other collections in the works. I have more oral history research on Black segregated education in Virginia that I’m hoping to publish as well as collect more stories and oral history. So, there’s more poetry and prose, more writing, in my future for sure; there’s work to do. All I need is time. Keep up with my new work and happenings online via social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I serve on the Board of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective. I am looking forward to all of the new work that will be inspired by and spring forth from the Collective in poetry, novels, essays, research, scholarship, documentary, anthologies, and digital works individual and collaborative. It’s a great time to be alive and writing! There’s a lot to write about and so many good reasons to be a writer in this moment.
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