Today I am deeply honored to speak with novelist, essayist, and scholar Yuri Herrera about his new novel, Season of the Swamp, which is a deeply researched and dazzlingly imagined account of Benito Juarez’s time spent in exile in New Orleans.  We talk about what that time and place offered to Juarez’s understanding of a world coming into being—one of créolité and carnival, of mixedness and multiplicity, and what these sometimes hallucinatory moments offered his political vision.  We talk about what kinds of new visions of freedom are discovered in the midst of forms of slavery that horrify Juarez.  Very importantly, we relate all of this to the present day—to the genocide in Gaza, the violent ICE attacks in the United States, and the descent into unbridled, and unmasked fascism. We are especially grateful to Yuri for reading from his novel, and talking in depth about the importance of mixed languages and the new social worlds they reflect.

Bio

Yuri Herrera (Actopan, México, 1970). His first three novels have been translated into several languages: Kingdom Cons, Signs Preceding the End of the World, and Transmigration of Bodies. In 2016 he shared with translator Lisa Dillman the Best translated Book Award for the translation of Signs Preceding the End of the World. That same year he received the Anna Seghers Prize at the Academy of Arts of Berlin, for the body of his work. His latest books are A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, Ten Planets, and Season of the Swamp. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at Tulane University, in New Orleans.

Today I have the true honor of speaking with journalist, storyteller, historical researcher, and Native American ceremonial dancer Julian Brave Noisecat about his book, We Survived the Night.  This highly original book blends many voices and registers, from both well-known but also buried and purposefully obscured historical archives, to tribal and family stories.  Foremost are the legends and adaptations of the Coyote figure—which haunts, inspires, deceives, and, yes, teaches lessons that help Indigenous peoples survive the night. We spend some time talking about how Coyote is many things at once, but not all the time, we discuss notions of purity and mixedness, multiplicity and singularity, truth and lies, and come out on the side of generosity, love, and creativity, to make worlds that deserve not only to survive, but also to thrive.

Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer and student of Salish art and history. His first documentary, Sugarcane, directed alongside Emily Kassie, follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at the Indian residential school NoiseCat’s family was sent to near Williams Lake, British Columbia. Sugarcane premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where NoiseCat and Kassie won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. The film was recognized with dozens of awards including Best Documentary from the National Board of Review and was nominated for an Academy Award. A proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation of Mount Currie, NoiseCat’s first book, We Survived the Night, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Random House Canada, and Profile Books in October 2025 and was an instant national bestseller in Canada with translations forthcoming from Albin Michel in France, Aufbau Verlag in Germany, Iperborea in Italy, and Libros del Asteroide in Spain.

NoiseCat’s journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker and has been recognized with many awards including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize, which honors “excellence in long-form, narrative or deep reporting on stories about underrepresented and/or misrepresented groups in the present American landscape.” In 2021, NoiseCat was named to the TIME100 Next list of emerging leaders alongside the starting point guard of his fantasy basketball team, Luka Doncic.

You, with your tongue

against the backs of teeth.

You, of ahhhhhhh,

of sssssssss. 

Let me ask you this:

which one of us the drum’s

old skin & which

the stick? You know

why I’m asking.

You’ve been bargaining again.

Death was spreading its fungus

on a fig; eating tomorrow’s honey.

Don’t say you did what you could.

Don’t give me lessons on the wasp

that burrows into the center, losing her wings.

A truck with body bags came in.

People took what they needed.

What did they need?

They needed a cup of flour.

They needed an iron pill.

But instead, you were—where?

whose?

The people counted:

 “One.”

 “One.”

 “One.”

Oh Language, what

hush you made below.

Poem Note: the lines, “One.” /“One.” / “ One.” are a reference to these lines from Pádraig Ó Tuama: “…so I count //one life / one life / one life / one life / one life // because each time / is the first time / that life / has been taken.”

First published by Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora (Palestine Writes Press)

THE CLOCK MEN

All day, the talk is lint.

Committees meet and look at their calendars.

The carpet hardly moves.

The lobby doesn’t even smell of corpses.

It’s Monday here.

There’s a salad bar here.

In Rafah, a wall is blown off by somebody’s son.

He’s gotten his life back on track now.

His father doesn’t cry outside his door anymore.

A tiny nozzle mists the lettuce.

The clock on each laptop jogs on its treadmill.

At 12:31, the meeting resumes.

No one looks at the sky anymore.

Looking has gotten risky.

Once I looked at a birthday cake

and saw a president’s face.

It was burning there

next to a piece of my cousin’s bedroom.

There were no balloons but when I looked up I saw a cloud inflating—round and swollen,

dark around the edges, bleeding through with light, pulling more and more filament into her

breasts, bright powdery hearts and fleshy grays folding into her, and still more, dense fast

moving bars and flat brown sheets that smothered the sun curling into her mass, until she

was heaving, large, now straddling the earth, bearing down–

that day, we sang an old song

and ate cake with our hands

until we had to leave

the world we knew behind.

But there were some who stayed, gripping their keyboards

even as gales lifted the roof off their box, typing:

Fill out this meeting poll today!

You must choose between 2:05 and 2:08!

First published by Social Text: https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/the-clock-men/

GRANT PROPOSAL FOR YOUR EMERGENCY

1. Objective: To hold my beloved’s hand by the sea.

2. Please describe your project in as much detail as possible: 

My hair will fly into my lover’s mouth

and we will smile until the facial muscles

can pull upwards no more. Then, we will enter the sea.

Swill every blue tincture.

3. What is the nature of your emergency? 

What is the nature of your fund?

4. Projected outcomes: 

• My lover’s terrible drawing of the sea
• A slowly emptied pot of mahshi
• One photograph of my beloved’s back entering the sea, palms raised

as though to say, It’s not too cold

5. What investments will your project require?

For my beloved’s hand to be pulled out of a witness’ testimony

and returned to me. The past to not be a bleeding

visitor who asks why the ambulance never arrives.

6. Proposed budget:

7. Please provide a schedule of deliverables: 

And you can find the report of what we did tied to a kite

First published by Adi Magazine: https://adimagazine.com/articles/two-poems-wathington/

Today I have the privilege and pleasure of speaking with Nicholas Mirzoeff and Priscilla Wathington about the genocide in Gaza, and how developing a new way of seeing and writing is demanded of us to address this historical moment. In the words of Silvia Federici, “Palestine is the World.”  We take Nick’s recent book, To See in the Dark, and animate it by having Priscilla read from her poetry.

Nick writes: “After a year of genocide, I think politics is now the meeting of the visible and the unspeakable. Unspeakable in that what is visible is so awful as to be beyond ordinary words. Unspeakable in that what is visible is forbidden to be said.

What has been sayable about the unspeakable? It has been poets who have found ways to make language do what it should not have to do.”

The goal behind this dynamic interplay is to create the grounds for solidarity with Palestine, and with all other oppressed peoples in the world, and with the planet itself.

Please see the blog for this episode to find the poems read by Priscilla Wathington.

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor and chair in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. To See In The Dark: Palestine and Visual  Activism  (2025) is being translated into Czech, Italian and Spanish. It is the most recent of more than a dozen books, including How To See The World (2015), translated into eleven languages. Since Occupy Wall Street (2011), his work has been in dialogue with social movements, including Black Lives Matter (The Appearance of Black Lives Matter) and #MeToo. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, The Nation and LARB. He lives in New York.

Priscilla Wathington is a Palestinian American poet/editor and the author of the chapbook, Paper and Stick, which draws from her past human rights advocacy work. She is asking you to resist the lie that you are too helpless, or too busy, or too small to change anything. Take your small hand and your small voice and add it to this symphony against the genocide taking place in Gaza; and speak up not only about Gaza but also Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and your own backyard, and everywhere that humanity is at risk.

Today I am delighted to talk with Eunsong Kim about her stunning book, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property. It is remarkable in its theoretical conceptualization, argument, and archival work. Kim argues that the beginnings of elite art collection in the United States coincided with the rise of the robber barons and the suppression of the labor movement. She connects this to Taylorism and the idea of scientific management, that further extenuated the rift between the mind and the body, between intellectual activity and labor. Not coincidentally, this distribution of kinds of work created a new distribution of value. In each case, Kim argues, race played a fundamental role. Ranging from the “found” art of Duchamp to the pseudo-Marxist conceptual art of Sierra, Kim eviscerates both pretention and cruelty, and restores the laboring body and what it produces to prominence, along with a truly re-invigorated and capacious sense of the Imagination outside of the constraints of neoliberal aesthetics.

Eunsong Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. She is the author of gospel of regicide (2017), and with Sung Gi Kim she translated Kim Eon Hee’s poetic text Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? published in 2019. Her monograph, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property (Duke 2024) materializes the histories of immaterialism by examining the rise of US museums, avant-garde forms, digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to consider how race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions. In 2021 she co-founded offshoot, an arts space for transnational activist conversations.

Today I talk with poet Maya Salameh about her poetry collection, How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, which won the prestigious Etal Adnan Poetry Prize in 2022. The judges remarked, “Maya Salameh’s poetry stood out for its inventiveness in cracking the code of life ‘between system and culture’…The turns and swerves the poems make are astonishing; the expectations they upend are remarkable… It’s a testament to the aesthetic boundaries and intellectual revolt poets of Arab heritage are pushing, breaking, and reinventing.” We talk about what led her to both technology and poetry, language and story-telling, and the challenges and joys of representing life in the diaspora. In a time of war and genocide, Salameh’s poetry shows how patterns of life and reproduction and desire persist. In her readings and discussions of three poems, we find a new lexicon and a new grammar.

Maya Salameh is the author of Mermaid Theory (Haymarket Books, 2026), How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, and the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities, and served as a National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, AGNI, Mizna, and the LA Times, among others. She can be found @mayaslmh or mayasalameh.com.

Today I talk with Huda Fakhreddine, writer, translator, and scholar of Arabic literature. Among the many topics we touch upon are the challenges of teaching Arabic literature, especially Palestinian literature, in a time of genocide, when universities, professional organizations, and political groups militate against any honest discussion of these topics, and punish those who do.  We talk about the notion of belonging, and the importance of being able to choose what to belong to, and what not to. Huda speaks of the freedom found in living in Arabic, and explains what that means to her.  She also reads in Arabic and English Nima Hasan’s stunning and wrenchingly beautiful poem, “Old Song.”

Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Among her translations are The Sky That Denied Me: Selections from Jawdat Fakhreddine (University of Texas Press, 2020), The Universe, All at Once: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books, 2024), and Palestinian: Four Poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah (World Poetry Books, 2024). Her creative work includes a book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time under a Different Sun), Dar al-Nahda, Beirut, 2019 and the forthcoming Wa min thamma al-ālam (And then the World), Manshūrāt Marfa’, Beirut, 2025. Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Protean, Lithub, Words Without Borders, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, and Middle Eastern Literatures among many others.  She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and section editor of the Encyclopedia of Islam.

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson about her new book, Theory of Water.  Theory of Water is a rich, complex, and deeply personal reflection on world-making and life-giving processes best captured in the fluidity of water as it circulates through all our bodies and the planet.  It is a largely collective project that enlists our listening and love, and helps us face the violence of all forms of dominance, enclosure, and containment.  We are especially gifted to have the chance to listen to one of the songs from Leanne’s album, Theory of Ice, and have her comment on it and the relation of her music to her writing.  This is a particularly special episode of Speaking Out of Place.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician.  She is the author of eight previous books, including the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies, which was short listed for the Dublin Literary prize and the Governor General’s award for fiction. Leanne’s album, Theory of Ice, released by You’ve Changed Records in 2021 and short-listed for the Polaris Prize and she was the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award. Her latest project Theory of Water was published by Knopf Canada/Haymarket books in the spring of 2025.  Leanne is a member of Alderville First Nation.

Today I have the honor and the pleasure to speak once again with celebrated poet and physician, Fady Joudah. The last time Fady was on the podcast was in November, 2023, shortly after the outbreak of war in Gaza. At that point we spoke about the impossibility of, even then, quantifying the genocide. Today we focus on the politics of language—in particular, the distinction Fady Joudah makes between Palestine in English, and Palestine in Arabic. We speak too of the need for and limitations of solidarity, and finish with a reading and discussion of one of Fady Joudah’s most remarkable and stunning poems, “Truth is Never Finished.”

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. He was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He was educated at the University of Georgia, the Medical College of Georgia, and the University of Texas Health Sciences in Houston. In 2002 and 2005 he worked with Doctors Without Borders in Zambia and Sudan, respectively.

Joudah’s debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic (2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, chosen by Louise Glück. Joudah followed his second book of poetry, Alight (2013) with Textu (2014), a collection of poems written on a cell phone wherein each piece is exactly 160 characters long. His fourth collection is Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018).  In 2014, Joudah was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.

As critic Charles Bainbridge observed in a 2008 Guardian review of The Earth in the Attic, “Joudah’s poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.”

Joudah translated  several collections of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work in The Butterfly’s Burden (2006), which won the Banipal prize from the UK and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and in If I Were Another, which won a PEN USA award in 2010. His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan‘s Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. His other translations include Amjad Nasser‘s Petra: The Concealed Rose and A Map of Signs and Scents.

Joudah lives with his family in Houston, where he works as a physician of internal medicine.

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Sarah T Roberts about the hidden humans behind Artificial Intelligence, which is reliant on executives and business managers to direct AI to promote their brand and low-level, out-sourced, and poorly paid content managers to slog through masses of images, words, and data before they get fed into the machine. We talk about the cultural, sociological, financial, and political aspects of AI. We end by taking on Elon Musk and the DOGE project, as an emblem of how Silicon Valley executives have embraced a brand of tech rapture that disdains and destroys democracy and attacks the idea that people can take care of each other, independent of sociopathic libertarianism.

Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. is a full professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies), specializing in Internet and social media policy, infrastructure, politics and culture, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Informed by feminist Science and Technology Studies perspectives, Roberts is keenly interested in the way power, geopolitics and economics play out on and via the internet, reproducing, reifying and exacerbating global inequities and social injustice.