By Alissa Bird
FROM: The Coachella Review

For Lisbeth Coiman, poetry and literature are a lens through which we can better understand one another. Her distinct voice is the product of a life lived across three countries as a poet, educator, and cultural worker. In her latest poetry collection, Uprising/Alzamiento (Finishing Line Press, 2021), Coiman demands that we confront the humanitarian crisis facing her home country of Venezuela, a crisis born out of political and economic turmoil that has left the Venezuelan people without proper access to food, water, and medicine. This collection, written in both English and Spanish, bears witness to this devastating reality and asks some of the greatest questions facing humankind: How do we respond to human suffering? How are we complicit? At the heart of this unsparing and expansive collection is Coiman’s resonant voice, a voice that lingers long after reading.

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TCR: What was your first experience with poetry?

Lisbeth Coiman:  In college in Venezuela, I studied languages and so I learned a lot about American history, American literature, as well as British history and British literature. But, of course, as most Americans have done, I read a lot of dead white men, right? But eventually, I took a social linguistics class called Language and Culture, and it brought me to life. In that class, I met writers and poets like June Jordan and Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Gwendolyn Brooks, mostly women and African American writers. And I read a lot of diaspora writers, people who write in English but who are not born in English-speaking countries, or African writers who have English as a first language but come from the Empire. I remember one book, The Empire Writes Back, which was written mostly by writers who were born in the colonies and who wrote in English. This was my first encounter with literature that I could grasp, as in, “This is real; these are people like me.”

I became interested in African American poets of the civil rights movement, especially the role of women in that movement. I based my entire thesis on the poetry of Sonia Sanchez through a black feminist perspective. My tenet was that you could not understand Sonia Sanchez using the, how do you say, poetics that we use to analyze Shakespeare or all the dead white writers, we need to use a poetics that reflects the cultural context that these women, these poets have been immersed in, poetics that reflect the intersection of politics, race, gender, and class.

So my first encounter was as an analyst of poetry, not a writer of poetry. I was doing social, linguistic analysis, trying to understand how poetry gave me the living experience of these people. Although we [Venezeulans] experienced racism and had a shared history of slavery, we did not experience it in the same way. Read Rest Of Interview Here