This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts. Robert Frost allegedly said he was not a teacher but an “awakener.” On every episode of this podcast, host Lena Crown speaks with writers, artists, critics, and scholars across generations who have awakened something for one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence.
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On this special bonus ‘Re-Awakeners’ episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with writer Tiana Clark about the person who first told her she was a poet: her late mentor and high school teacher, Mr. Bill Brown.
Tiana was a rebellious teenager. “They’re talking about you in the teacher’s lounge,” Mr. Brown warned her once. But instead of punishing Tiana for acting out, Mr. Brown gifted her the poetry of Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee, and Sharon Olds, writers whose work broke all the rules Tiana had learned in school. He continued to support Tiana for the next twenty years, cheering her on through her MFA applications, her chapbook publication, and the publication of her first book.
We discuss Mr. Brown’s legacy in Tiana’s poetry, pedagogy, and attention to the natural world. In the second half of the episode, Tiana reads “Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy” from her new collection Scorched Earth, a poem that illuminates the darker history behind the pedestrian greenway where Tiana walked every day in the pandemic, and where she saw Mr. Brown for the last time.
We talk about the form of the sestina and what it means to “break” it or “fail” at it. We also talk about Tiana’s derailed future as a historian, the politics of traveling (and writing about travel) as a Black woman, and the elegy as a temporary haunting and resurrection.
Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com
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Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth; I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; and Equilibrium, which won the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and Tennessee State University, where she studied Africana and women’s studies. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Find out more at TianaClark.com.
Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.
More Tiana: https://www.tianaclark.com/
Order Scorched Earth, out March 4, 2025: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Scorched-Earth/Tiana-Clark/9781668052075
