Interview with Courtney Faye Taylor on Concentrate
Winner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Courtney Faye Taylor’s debut poetry collection, Concentrate, is an ingenious palimpsest of the past and the present. Through poetry, prose, and visual art, Taylor’s collection is a multi-modal and innovative act of preservation, exploration, and discovery. We’re grounded in the work with “The Talk,” an intimate moment between an aunt and niece, as the niece learns of the murder of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins. From there, Taylor’s pieces explore the relationship between Black and Asian American communities, the violences that manifest from White supremacy, the intricacies of Black girlhood, and so much more.
Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor is a critical book in its work to preserve Harlins’ story and ensuring that we always say her name. It was such an honor to speak with Taylor, learn more about the genesis of this collection, and to simply be in the presence of a writer whose work and dedication to craft I admire.
Zakiya Cowan: I just want to start off by saying ‘thank you’ for writing this book. I vaguely remember learning about the murder of Latasha Harlins. I must’ve been in middle school or elementary school and I distinctly remember the feeling of realizing how young she was because she was around my age and just the shock of that. I would love to know: when did you decide that you wanted to write this book and further preserve her story?
Courtney Faye Taylor: Concentrate actually started with one poem that now appears as the second poem in the collection. It’s called “The Talk,” and it's a dialogue between an aunt and her niece. The aunt is giving her niece “the talk,” which in the Black community we know to be the conversation where prejudice and racism are first explained to a Black child. And so in this poem, the aunt is using the story of Latasha Harlins to spur that conversation.
Telling the stories of Black youth that are taken from us by racial violence is an act of memorialization, but it's also a means of indicting white supremacy. Sharing their stories is a way of saying, “Let's not forget what has happened to us and what continues to happen to us.” But I think too often the stories of our lost children are reduced to stories of loss and not stories of life. I wanted to see Latasha in her full Black girlhood more than I wanted to see her in her death. That was the impetus for excavating her story.
ZC: I think what really struck me about this book is the fact that I feel like most people don't know anything about her life past that particular event. Then, it got me thinking that as Black women, oftentimes our narratives get lost in the shuffle, and oftentimes it’s the work of Black women to preserve our stories. How long were you working on the collection?
CFT: This actually started as a totally different book. Many of the poems in Concentrate existed in an earlier manuscript about my father. A lot of those poems explored Black girlhood, so there was a natural tie-in to the aspects of Latasha's life I wanted to explore. In 2019, I lifted poems from that old manuscript, and they became the foundation for Concentrate.
I was primarily interested in the relationship between Black and Asian American communities, so that was the start of Concentrate; it wasn't necessarily Latasha’s story. But as I did more research, Latasha became central. I owe a lot to Brenda Stevenson's The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots, which is this massive scholarship on Latasha Harlins, Soon Ja Du (the shopkeeper who killed Latasha), and Joyce Karlin (the judge who presided over the case). Stevenson’s work is what got me interested in Latasha beyond what Latasha means as a symbol of Black and Asian American tensions.
ZC: Have you always been interested in exploring how white supremacy negatively impacts the relationship between communities of color? As well as how we unify with one another?
CFT: Yeah, it’s always been a curiosity of mine. I think learning about prejudice between communities of color was jarring to me as a young person. The first space I remember seeing that in was Black beauty supply stores owned by Asian American people. Before that, I only understood anti-Blackness as a violence done by white people. We don't often talk about the insidious ways white supremacy can manifest between communities of color. When we do talk about those tensions, we seem to forget white supremacy as the culprit. It’s glossed over, even though it’s what’s orchestrating the violence.
If we're talking about Black and Asian American communities specifically, we also forget the ways that we’ve been in solidarity. Before and after the LA uprising, our communities were working together. There were organizations like the Black-Korean Alliance dedicated to unity and organizing. White supremacy’s job is to make us forget these things.
ZC: Going off of that question, I noticed that the centipede shows up in a lot of your poems, and there's a line where it says, “I see our disappointment begins at the crux of white people's involvement.” Visually, to me, the timelines you have in the book resemble a centipede in which white supremacy is the body, and then from that sprouts these acts of violence and stereotypes. I could be way off with that, but I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that insect symbolizes to you.
CFT: This is what I'm so excited about; hearing how readers interpret things in ways I never expected. Centipedes were on my mind because they’re the bugs I saw most often in my house growing up, so it came to me that way.
I had a friend read the manuscript and she looked up what centipedes symbolize, and she told me they can symbolize concentration, which was really interesting considering the book’s title. I hadn't really thought deeply about centipedes before, but I really love your reading of it, so that's my new answer: white supremacy and the violence that sprouts from it.
ZC: Yeah I just made that connection when I was rereading the book and thought that was interesting. So, towards the latter half of the book, you go to LA, and I’m wondering: how did the physical proximity to Harlins’ life impact writing the rest of the book? What was it like emotionally to be in that setting and close that distance?
CFT: I had already written the bulk of Concentrate when I finally got the opportunity to go to LA. Before that, Concentrate was solely based on research I did through literature, documentaries, and other online materials. In LA, I was able to go to the particular places that are significant to Latasha’s memory, like her gravesite, her middle school, and the grounds of Empire Liquor where she was killed. It was amazing to see how I could be in a city 30 years later and still feel the power [and] the devastation of what happened there.
I think that section, “Four Memorials,” is the most important because it felt like my life, my insights, my fears, and my joys were directly in conversation with Latasha's. I could see my own Black girlhood differently after having experienced the places where Latasha spent hers.
ZC: In visiting these landmarks of her life and taking that extra step to preserve her narrative and showcase that she was a three-dimensional person, or as you say in the book to “resist our second dying,” how did you protect yourself from the harm that this resistance and this work can do to the body and the mind?
CFT: Yeah, that's such a good question. I think sometimes just being able to switch to a different creative mode was part of how I protected myself. Writing about trauma very directly can be taxing. It’s exhausting and sometimes frustrating to try to put into words a certain violence, so the visual poem was a form that gave me space to address these difficult concepts in a new way. I think the freedom I had to step back and say, ‘okay, this needs to be a visual poem,’ or ‘this needs to be a dialogue between two characters,’ gave me the opportunity to use every tool at my disposal to tell this story.
In general, I think rest is about letting my body tell me what it needs. It looks different depending on the day. I love going on walks; I love being outside. I think writing as an act of resistance can feel heavy and solitary, especially because I do a lot of that work alone at home. So I have to make time to be outside in the physical world and be outside of the world in my head.
ZC: I want to piggyback off of what you were talking about in terms of incorporating visuals in the book, which was another element that really stood out to me. Particularly, the collages of the Black women’s faces. I’d love to know more about your process.
CFT: I think there are some stories that can't be told in their fullness unless we reach for multiple modes of expression and take an interdisciplinary approach. There’s a poem I have early on in the book, I think on page 15. It’s a collage that features lyrics from Ice Cube’s song, “Black Korea” with images I took in a beauty supply store. There's something about seeing the surveillance video images of Black women taped to the front counter of this store that I can't describe in words. I just have to show it. And so I do.
In “Light Attire,”—the poem that’s a collage of faces—there's something I want to say about the disappearance of Black women and girls. I could write about that, sure, but there's nothing that can tell the story more accurately and hauntingly than seeing the faces of these women and girls or reading the words used to describe them on flyers.
Concentrate wasn't always visual. The first visual poem I made for the book was created the night of a first book prize deadline. Anytime a deadline comes up, I have some new last-minute idea, and that day, it was this collage. I was rushing to get it done. Ultimately, it didn't make it into the manuscript that I sent off. But I kept working on it. It took time to figure out what I was trying to say and what those found materials could say. ”Light Attire” opened the possibility for more collages, photos, and archival materials to be included in the book.
ZC: I’m just curious, outside of writing, is visual art another passion that you pursue?
CFT: I’m trying to start a consistent visual art practice. Sometimes I come to writing and have such high expectations of myself. I’m like, ‘okay, I’ve done this for so long, I’ve studied this for years, so I need to know what I’m doing.’ Sometimes the fun gets lost under all that self-induced pressure. But when I go to visual art, I’m a complete novice. There’s freedom in just being able to do whatever I want. Working in a visual space gives me some appreciation for experimentation that I can take back to writing when I’ve forgotten the joy of it.
ZC: I love that; I am going to try that. I would love to talk about the cover. I remember when I first saw it on Twitter, it just blew my mind how beautiful it is. What was the process like finding the cover for this book? Was it always going to be this cover or were you thinking about something different?
CFT: Well before the book was picked up, I’d been saving images I came across on Instagram that I thought would make good covers. By the time I won the Cave Canem prize, I had a whole folder of Instagram images. I decided on the photo, “Mother and Child” by Mark Clennon and Asia Rivera. I love it because it mirrors the opening scene of Concentrate where an aunt is doing her niece’s hair.
I think there's so much intimacy in getting your hair done as a Black child. It’s a really loving act because someone's taking time out of their day to beautify you, but it’s also an act that can involve struggle. Sometimes there’s pain [and] discomfort; sometimes there’s directions you have to follow—a certain way you’ve got to tilt your head or angle your body. And for the person doing the hair, there can be various forms of exhaustion. But by the end, these two people have spent hours in connection with one another. I was really interested in what can happen in those hours. My girlhood is made up of years and years of those hours. I wanted that to be felt on the cover.
ZC: Yeah, seeing the cover just brought me back to my mom oiling my scalp, and there’s such a closeness to it that really resonated with me and I think will resonate with lots of Black women who have this experience. As you said, getting your hair done or doing somebody’s hair, especially in the Black community, is like an act of love; it shows that you’re being cared for. I’d like to know who are some writers you feel that your work is in conversation with, be it directly or indirectly. Or, some writers you feel influence your work.
CFT: Citizen by Claudia Rankine came to me early on in my writing career, and the book completely erased any previous limitations I had on what poetry can accomplish and how it can move. It encouraged me to use visual elements, nonfiction, [and] other forms to approach poetry. I also think of Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of. Of course, the way she uses images of her brother to write into that loss, but I also think our work is in conversation when it comes to familial history in general. It’s something I'm exploring more in my new work because I'm returning to that old manuscript about my father.
ZC: Yeah, Ghost Of is a book that I just return to again and again; it’s just so amazing. For those who read Concentrate and who want to learn more about Latasha Harlins or the LA riots, what would you suggest?
CFT: I think number one [is] The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots. Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong was great for me to read just to understand Asian American experiences in this country, but also the ways those experiences compare and contrast to Black experiences. In Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 Anna Deavere Smith interviews people who lived through the uprising and transcribes those interviews into monologues that are performed as a one-woman show. In terms of poetry, I think of Bodega by Su Hwang. It’s a collection that explores a Korean girl’s coming of age in New York City during the uprising. Those are the texts that I really appreciate, the ones that have a very important perspective on Latasha Harlins, the riots, and Black and Asian American relations.
ZC: I’m definitely going to check those out. Is there anything else that you would like to add about the book? Or is there anything, once it finally comes out into the world, you're hoping that people get from it?
CFT: I think I’m most excited about being present with my readers and being in conversation with them. I'm excited to be in spaces, particularly Black and Asian American spaces, where I can speak and listen. I want us to imagine what we want out of our togetherness and our future. I'm looking forward to that conversation most of all.
About Courtney Faye Taylor
Courtney Faye Taylor is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Concentrate (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Courtney earned her BA from Agnes Scott College and her MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where she received the Hopwood Prize in Poetry. A recipient of the 92Y Discovery Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize, Courtney’s work can be found in Poetry Magazine, The Nation, Ploughshares, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. // courtneyfayetaylor.com