by Brian Dunlap

F. Douglas Brown is equally a poet and educator, teaching English and African American poetry at Loyola High School in Los Ángeles. He pushes his students to think critically about the themes and ideas found in the literature he assigns and how they relate to issues relevant to their lives. Brown has even created a Pedagogy of Protest Reading List that includes The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. Dubois, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison and any of the Black Arts Movement poets like Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, to connect how literature is used to connect the personal with the political as seen in African American literature and in Black lives.

In his poetry—Zero to Three (University of Georgia Press, 2014) and Icon (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018)—Brown discusses fatherhood, the roles of husband, father and son and the legacy and weight of his namesake, Frederick Douglas. Plus, the consideration and re-consideration of these role models into an examination of himself.

It all started in the late 1980s when Brown caught the poetry bug after he read Quincy Troupe’s poem “Magic Johnson.” And now in Brown’s latest interview for The Chills at Will Podcast, he talks muses, art, the artistic collective Cave Canem, fatherhood, poetry, his own influences and more.