Sheila Black | September 2021

Andrea Sanderson

Even though the ongoing pandemic has led to isolation in so many communities, it has also led to new explorations of ways to come together. Poetry consumption rose during the pandemic period—perhaps because for so many communities, poetry provided a way of expressing their feelings, reactions, and ideas as well as building bridges across physical and psychic distances. One person who demonstrates how poetry can bring a community together is San Antonio Poet Laureate Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson. The thirty-nine-year-old poet, rapper, singer, and performer has a long history of teaching in the community. Recently, she received a 2021 Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. These $50,000 awards, funded by the Mellon Foundation, are given to “honor poets of literary merit appointed to serve in civic positions and to enable them to undertake meaningful, impactful, and innovative projects that engage their fellow residents.”

Sheila Black: Well, I know it’s extremely competitive. A total of twenty-three of us won, and I’m going to do something called the Echo Project. A team of community artists I've worked with for years helped me develop the idea. The Echo Project involves elders in the community who will be interviewed by youth about what they’ve accomplished and experienced. The youth will write their own pieces: poems, short stories, plays. We will be teaching workshops that introduce them to various literary forms. Then they will be paired with musicians and visual artists to create performance pieces from their writings that will be performed live. I’m really excited to see where this multi-generational conversation takes us.

Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson: Well, I know it’s extremely competitive. A total of twenty-three of us won, and I’m going to do something called the Echo Project. A team of community artists I've worked with for years helped me develop the idea. The Echo Project involves elders in the community who will be interviewed by youth about what they’ve accomplished and experienced. The youth will write their own pieces: poems, short stories, plays. We will be teaching workshops that introduce them to various literary forms. Then they will be paired with musicians and visual artists to create performance pieces from their writings that will be performed live. I’m really excited to see where this multi-generational conversation takes us.

Black: How did you come up with this idea?

Sanderson: It’s an idea I’ve had for a long time. In grade school, there was this older gentleman—I don’t remember his name, but he was a storyteller. He came to my classroom. He would change his voice and tell us these crazy awesome stories. This other older lady also came to talk to my class. She was a Holocaust survivor, and I was so moved by the stories she told. These were the moments I cherished most as a child: when older people from the community came in and told stories.

My city, San Antonio, is an old city, a very multicultural city. We are full of a sense of tradition, but while we understand the ritual, we often don’t know the “why” behind the ritual. If you are a little kid, and you are taking part in Dios de los Muertos, you are taught about the face painting and the ofrenda—the home altars people set up for Dios de los Muertos—but when you get older, you start to understand the stories. Why the objects in an ofrenda are chosen and displayed. What they mean in terms of talking to or about the person who is gone. Why it’s significant. This is allegory. This is the moral or meaning that story gives you. For me, a key part of any celebration—think of griots, troubadours, and the role they play in helping a culture survive over time..

Black: How did you come up with this idea?

Black: You became Poet Laureate at a unique, some would say very difficult, time. Can you talk about what that was like ?

Sanderson: I was told right after AWP, and I had to hold on to the secret for about a month. We went into lockdown. We were told you could only go to work and go home. I am an essential staff worker—like so many others, I was going to work and coming home and worried about what I was bringing home, because I work in a juvenile detention facility, and the kids come in from everywhere. I was thinking about the fear people felt, some of the hopelessness they felt. I was thinking about how we were all missing seeing each other as we had before. I decided I needed to respond. I wanted to give people a sense of hope and purpose so I came up with some little things we could do together. I released the “#MyTongue is…” Challenge—write a two or three line poem completing this phrase and pair it with an image. People could create digital poetry posters on Canva or other apps and share them on Facebook. We received over 200 hundred of these digital postcards from San Antonio and around the world.

Then came the summer of 2020: the killings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. How could I be quiet? I cofounded “Black Lives and Allies in Community” in San Antonio. (The acronym is BLAC). I worked with a lot of different people—churches—whoever wanted to be allies in overcoming institutional racism in our community. We raised money through performances and outreach, and we gave that money to grassroots Black organizations .

Around the same time, I gave a TEDx Talk: “Poetry and the Power of Your Voice.” It was kind of surreal. I did it at Palo Alto College, here in San Antonio. There was no audience—just me, a couple of masked crew members, and a television screen. For me that really spoke to the time we were in: being alone in a theatre.

After that, I did a mural project for Black Lives Matter around Travis Park in downtown San Antonio. I also partnered with the San Antonio Musuem of Art to distribute “Action Bags” containing art supplies, blank postcards, and stamps. People were encouraged to send postcards to people in government or people they admired telling them the change they wanted to see. For me, it was another way to help people connect. I’m always about this idea of bridging through conversations, storytelling—finding ways to open up to other people beyond the Zoom app.

Black: Connecting people despite the pandemic?

Sanderson: Yes, and poetry and letter writing felt like ways to do that.

For me, Poetry and letter writing are two of the most romantic forms of literature because they are ethereal and far reaching; yet also accessible and tangible. They respond to a moment. You think about life in the 18th and 19th centuries, and how important letter writing was in that period. People wrote each other letters all the time. These letters, when preserved, give us direct historical context. Also, letters can be public or private—just like a poem. The audience can be as big or as small as you want. Maybe your poem is just to one person—if the poet feels that sense of connection, if they choose to find a space in the poem to find the space to connect, they will.

When I was in grade school, we didn’t have cell phones, and we passed notes. You could start a note at the beginning of the day and pass it back and forth to your peers. It was so much fun, and I don’t want young adults to miss out on the beauty of that kind of writing.

Black: That brings up my next question. How did you start writing? What keeps you going as a writer?

Sanderson: I was six years old. My aunt had a typewriter at her house, and I thought that was fascinating. My cousins and sisters used to all fight over who could play on that typewriter. My sister is an avid reader. She read Moby Dick by the time she was nine years old. Maybe I took that from her, but I always remember the two of us reading books, talking about books. The first poem I ever wrote was for my mom when I was six years old. I don’t remember what it said, but whenever literary magazine season came around in school after that, I would submit. In middle school, a group of poems of mine got accepted, and I was over the moon. Then, when I was thirteen, I had a friend who was murdered by her boyfriend. I wrote a poem for her memorial service, and it was a deeply truthful poem. I read to her family and friends, and I saw how it impacted them. I was scared by what I’d written but I read it, and I saw that the poem spoke to people. When I write a poem, I am not just speaking for myself, I am speaking for Black people, and I am speaking for women. I am speaking for people who may not be heard, and I always want to have that impact.

Poetry can change perceptions. Poetry can contain a lot of information in a short bite, and that makes it powerful. Some things have a universal meaning—for example, the choking sign—if I act out choking wherever I am people will know what I mean. Some words are like that. When you use certain words, they hold that weight of cultural identity.

Black: You’ve been a community teaching artist for years. Can you share some lessons you've learned about teaaching writing?

Sanderson: I’ve discovered that you’ve got to demonstrate first. If you demonstrate what it looks like, they understand what it looks like. You can’t say “Write a poem.” You do it first and then say, “Look I’ve done it, and you can do it too.” If you are not willing to go through the fire to create this work, why should they? When I go into a classroom, the first thing I do is I perform for my students, impress them, blow their minds, intimidate them a little maybe, but also work to build their confidence.

Black: Do you use models from other poets as well?

Sanderson: Absolutely. You need to have mentor texts—and when you present the mentor texts, make it interesting for God’s sake. When you go into a class, you have to be on, and you can’t turn it off until after the last student exits the classroom. Even if you have students who look like they are not paying attention, some part of them is paying attention.

I also use group demonstration—“Hey, you can write a poem; let’s do it together.” If I have a tough class, I start by writing a group piece, having everyone come together: “Give me a line, give me an image, give me an idea.” When you make it something interactive—because learning has to be interactive, it has to be something where there is a call and response in the classroom—you find you open your students’ minds and, after that the sky’s the limit, really.

Black: Who are some poets who’ve influenced you?

Sanderson: Locally, Anthony-the-Poet Flores and Amalia Ortiz (author of The Canción Cannibal Cabaret). Anthony and Amalia were my first introduction to slam poetry, and I didn’t know much about the bilingual aspect or idea of playing with different dialects in a poem. I began to do that—using my dialect as an African American. I’m a musician and singer so I put music into my work as far as the cadence and meter of it, and then everyday English. I incorporate Spanish in my work because that’s my region—that’s part of the place where I’m from.

I feel like that idea of dialect and playing with different registers of language really inspired me since part of what we are doing is bringing who we are into the work—into the language. Culture has to influence the way we write. How could it not? We live among government, food, style—these are our lives. We start off mimicking the writers we admire until we find our own voice, and our own voice comes out of where we are, what surrounds us.

Black: Has the pandemic and/or being San Antonio Poet Laureate changed how you write?

Sanderson: I’ve started writing about things I've never touched on before. I’ve always tended to write about music and love—friends of mine tell me I’m a love poet—I don’t think that's always what I write about, but certain images and ideas do tend to reappear. I think that’s true for most poets, but maybe it's time to shake it up a little. This year, as Poet Laureate, I was faced with so many urgent issues and people were asking me to speak to them. For me, that's been a great thing. For most of us, someone has to issue a challenge before we maybe allow ourselves to move somewhere new in subject matter.

I hope the Echo Project does that for the elders and youth who participate. It bothers me that in so much of contemporary culture elders and youth are kept separated. That feels uncomfortable and unnatural to me. I believe you should introduce your children to your elders immediately. That needs to be a connection they make so quickly in life. As children we all want to be like our parents and grandparents. So many kids like to play in their parents’ or grandparents’ clothing! I want to find ways to honor that—preserve our relationship with those who came before us.

Black: Thanks Andrea. One final question—what do you think being a poet laureate is all about?

Sanderson: To me, being a poetlaureate is a role of public service. Any poet laureate—whatever society you live in—needs to look at what the disparities are, what things are missing, how through literacy, literature, and storytelling, you can give that back, how to fill the void through observation, celebration, and concrete initiatives. I’m always looking to fill that void.

You can learn more about Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson and her work at her website: andreavocabsanderson.com. You can also view her Tedx Talk “Poetry and the Power of Your Voice” here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujH8Tie7TTk

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Sheila Black is the Director of Development at AWP.