12 or 20 (second series) questions with AJ White

AJ White is a poet and educator from north Georgia. AJ’s debut poetry collection, Blue Loop , was selected for the 2024 National Poetry Series by Chelsea Dingman, published by University of Georgia Press September 2025. AJ has won the Fugue Poetry Prize, selected by Kaveh Akbar, and received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. AJ’s poems have been published recently in The Account, Best New Poets, Blackbird, Overheard, West Trade Review, and in the anthologies Ecobloomspaces and Green Verse. AJ lives and teaches creative writing in New York.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Publishing a book that I spent, oh, ten years working toward has reinforced in me the confidence to believe in my work and my vision and voice that has long been a struggle to maintain. I have more recent work that is very much a direct continuation of my first book, and I have recent work that may surprise readers of that first book to learn that I also have strikingly distinct interests and realms of knowledge and experience.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I did not come to poetry first! Poetry is a haven, a last resort. Poetry is a poor person’s genre: I do not have time, in adulthood, especially as a graduate student, to craft the fiction I wrote in my youth or to research the nonfiction I have practiced and enjoyed.

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?
Starting a new project is an immediate, spontaneous undertaking. First, the project only exists in my mind, somewhere unconscious. Then, suddenly, one day, it is on the page! And I see what I have been thinking about, and I write toward and into those strange confluences of thought.

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?
A poem always begins with a first line. The first line determines much about the poem. But, working backward, my attention (visually, sonically, rhetorically, conceptually) informs the first line and, of course, the lines that follow. I am very rarely working on a book from the beginning. Well, that’s not entirely true. Maybe every other book/project is a spontaneous, slowly realized assemblage, and every other book is a project nearly from the start, thus far.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings that I attend as an audience member are part of my creative process! But I do not write poems designed to live in the air, out loud. I write poems (hopefully) perfected for the page, especially as parts of greater projects/books.

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 have a strong sustained interest in what I consider both the largest and most minute question that we know of: what are we doing here? Not what is our “purpose,” but, minute by minute, what are we choosing to do? What are we doing with these selves on this planet in this universe?

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?
I cannot answer this question for anyone besides myself. But I do not ask for any role in culture. I am trying to write about, and, first, to find, human wisdom that is applicable and true beyond and underneath culture.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have never worked with an editor. I edited my first manuscript with feedback from friends.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Try easier. It’s a recovery concept. Stop trying harder and harder. Try easier most of the time. And rest.

10 - 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 wake up, make coffee (one large coffee only), then read a little, then write. Then I turn to the rest of the day and often do not write again until the following morning.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I just try to live life. Writing comes from 1) reading and 2) life. So, I also return to read good or better things if I am not writing in a way I am hoping to write.

12 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?
Halloween is special to me now because it is my sobriety date. So I suppose I am always dressing up as a person in recovery :)

13 - 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. Literature is made of literature. Everything listed above is literary, including nature and including god.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Mary Oliver. Jean Valentine. Charles Wright. Arthur Sze. Jenny Xie. Victoria Chang. Tomas Tranströmer. Monica Youn. Stonehouse.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Make enough money (not a lot of money; simply enough) to do more than survive.

16 - 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 am a teacher. I will always teach. I might have been a scientist. I am a scientist, I guess, but my theories and experiments are literary.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I read so much that writing comes out of me.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Everyone interested in the confluence of spirituality and poetry should pick up Red Pine’s translation of Stonehouse. For film: Le Samourai .

19 - What are you currently working on?
Always poems :)

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