Amorak Huey asked Hannah VanderHart:

What advice would you offer to a young white poet who wants their work to engage with whiteness, with their racial identity, but does not know how, does not know what that means for their poems?

Hannah VanderHart This is such a great question. I think the answer has to be: do the work. And this means figuring out what the conversation is, and how others speak about their lives and the lives of others. Go to the poets! Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely (before Citizen and The White Card!), C.D. Wright's Rising Falling Hovering (before One Big Self!), Tess Taylor's Forage House, Brenda Coultas's The Marvelous Bones of Time, Joy Katz's White: An Abstract (and Katz's essay "Awake In the Scratchy Dark: On Writing Whiteness" at American Poetry Review). Also get their hands on The Racial Imaginary. This work is simply waiting to be picked up.

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