Join poet Douglas Kearney and Poets & Writers Magazine contributing editor Destiny O. Birdsong for a reading and discussion of Kearney’s new poetry collection, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always. This free virtual event took place on Thursday, May 1, 2025, at 7:00 PM EDT.
In “Double Dreaming, Double Imagining,” a profile of the poet in the May/June 2025 issue, Birdsong explores Kearney’s process of transforming images and texts into dynamic conversations about Black identity, personhood, and art. “This is a trickster of a book,” Birdsong writes, “one that requires its reader to pay close attention to what is overt as well as what lurks beneath—in other words, to listen to ‘that loud-assed colored silence’ and to watch one’s ‘shadow, yo(u)’ (which happen to be the titles of the fifth and sixth sequences of the book). I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always is both weighty and whimsical. It plays with and on words, and as Kearney points out, it challenges its own methodology in a way that speaks to the precarious nature of Black life in America, this palimpsest of physical, economic, and existential vulnerability that many Black artists have grappled with—and managed to create beauty from—since birth.”
In this virtual event, Kearney will read from the new poetry collection and discuss with Birdsong what is overt as well as what lurks beneath his poetry which, as Birdsong writes, “continues to occupy multiple realms of past and present, untouched space and palimpsest, physical location and collective memory.”
Douglas Kearney has published nine books ranging from poetry to essays. In 2023, Optic Subwoof, a collection of his Bagley Wright lectures, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. His seventh, Sho (Wave Books), is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner. Kearney’s most recent collection, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always, was published with Wave Books in April 2025. Kearney is a Whiting Writers and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships including Cave Canem, the Rauschenberg Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation. He is a Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Professor of English at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.
Destiny O. Birdsong is a writer whose work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, Poets & Writers Magazine, African American Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She has received support from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Pink Door, MacDowell, The Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published by Tin House Books in 2020. Her debut novel, Nobody’s Magic, was published by Grand Central in 2022, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, was a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and won the 2022 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. She earned her BA in English and history from Fisk University, and her MFA in poetry and PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. In 2022, she was selected as the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Rutgers University-Newark and served as a 2022-24 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She is a contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine.
Photo credits: profile spread, Krizia Studios; Birdsong, Tony Gonzalez.