In early January the American Academy of Poets elected Afaa M. Weaver, Diane Seuss, and Jericho Brown to its Board of Chancellors. I was thrilled by the news, because these poets are patriotic literary citizens who belong to the world and relate to it with a gentle, transcultural consciousness. I was additionally happy for Weaver because of his longtime commitment to The Hopkins Review, where I am a contributing author. Weaver, who retired from Simmons University, where he held the Alumnae Endowed Chair for twenty years, has published several collections of poetry including A Fire in the Hills (2023), Spirit Boxing (2017), City of Eternal Spring (2014), and The Government of Nature (2013), which won him the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In a career spanning five decades of active writing and publishing, Weaver has received four Pushcart prizes, as well as numerous fellowships and awards, including a 1995 fellowship from the Pennsylvania State Arts Council, a 1998 Pew Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholar appointment to Taiwan, where he taught at the National Taiwan University and Taipei National University of the Arts. In 2023, the Academy of American Poets awarded him the Wallace Stevens Award. His papers are kept in the Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, and his portrait by Rachael Eliza Griffiths is installed in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Weaver is currently a member of the MFA faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.
We do not usually expect a life as troubled as Weaver’s and a history as cruel as that of the 1950s and ’60s Baltimore from which he emerged to offer calm to a future witness like me. But Weaver spoke with vision and care, taking on the paradox of American civilization with unsparing honesty. In this conversation, Weaver and I talk about the internal dialogue of his life and work.