Interview with Jameka Williams on American Sex Tape™
Jameka Williams’s debut poetry collection, American Sex Tape™, winner of the University of Wisconsin Press Brittingham Prize, is an American pop culture critique, a moving exploration of how social media and capitalism impact one’s sense of self, and an insightful showcase of what occurs when the voyeur becomes the subject. In our conversation, we discuss the collection’s unforgettable title, the Kardashians, writing about Blackness, and so much more.
Zakiya Cowan: I'm really happy to be having this conversation with you today. I remember when I first encountered your work, it was when I was on the editorial staff for Jet Fuel Review and we published “Plastic White Girl” and “The Animal.” I remember reading your poems and thinking, “I need to read her book. I can’t wait until she has a book.” So, when you announced that American Sex Tape™ was coming out, it was immediately on my radar. I’m just curious, how are you feeling about your debut coming into the world? Are you nervous? Excited? Relieved?
Jameka Williams: I think nervous is probably the first thing–actually–excitement hit me first. It’s sort of the obvious answer because you've been writing something, towards a goal, and you put in all this work and finish your MFA. It happened so quickly. I finished my MFA at Northwestern in June 2021, and then the prize was announced in March. I expected this book to spend a few years being shopped around, so for it to have won the Brittingham Prize was a complete shock to my system. But then complete nervousness took over because it’s no longer your book. It’s your baby–you’ve spent the most time with it. I’ve seen it the most. There was a point where I was getting sick of it and I didn't like it anymore because I was reading it so much. Then it’s like “Oh gosh, now that it’s published, it doesn’t belong to you,” so people will have ideas not only about what your themes are, your motives, or [what] your beliefs are from the poetry, but they’ll have feelings about you because poetry is that sticky thing where people assume the speaker in every poem is the poet themselves. So, I’m a little nervous. It didn’t hit me really until this past summer like “Oh god people will actually read it, my parents will read it.” I got aunts and uncles who are like, “I want a signed copy,” and I’m like, “You don’t want to read this, this ain’t for you.” But, I can’t tell them that because I want to make money. It’s just a complex of crazy excitement; finally, someone’s going to see the full project as a whole. I’ve been publishing these poems in pieces, and now seeing it together, versus “Oh god, people are going to see it.” It’s a good scary feeling, I suppose.
ZC: I have to ask about the title because I can't think, off the top of my head, of another title that stopped me in my tracks the way this one did. Why did you choose this title? Was it always going to be the original title for the collection, or did you have something else in mind?
JW: I had multiple terrible titles in mind, and the original title was The Kardashians for a Better America. That was when working with Simone Muench in my thesis year, and she’s awesome, we were still trying to get me to develop the book away from what started it, which is the chapbook in there, which is a bunch of persona poems from Kim Kardashian. We were editing away from that. As we took out a lot of the Kim Kardashian poems, we were like, “We want you to dig more into your more personal experience–responding not only to Kim but the cultural criticism that you have for this celebrity. So, it didn’t make sense for that title to stick anymore– there were fewer of those Kardashian poems in the book and more of me. But then, I just had a slew of terrible titles after that. Honestly, Simone came up with the title, [so] I’m happy she’s letting me steal it. I think I remember her telling me, “Make sure you don’t let this title get out because someone will take it.” It’s an amazing title and she saw the book better than I did at the time.
There are several central themes and motifs happening, but they all kind of boil down to this discussion not only about American popular culture and money or [the] obsession with money, but how the media frames sex. There are so many motifs about looking and being looked at and being under any kind of power dynamic gaze, whether that’s the male gaze or you’re under a capitalist gaze. For her, American Sex Tape™ made sense, and it also cheekily reminds everyone that there are a few poems in here about Kim Kardashian. I think it’s still one of the better parts of the whole book [because] the title kind of snaps people back.
ZC: I love that. When I was reading the book and seeing all of the mentions of Kim Kardashian, I was very fascinated because I've pretty much watched Keeping up With the Kardashians since its genesis. It’s been really interesting to watch her, and her family, go from being this crazy family whose dad represented O.J. Simpson and one of the sisters had a sex tape, to them shifting to these cultural icons. They’ve made a huge impact on things like beauty standards, especially in this digital age with social media and we’re all constantly consuming images of other people. I’m curious what drew you to Kim Kardashian, and the Kardashians in general, for these poems.
JW: Well, I started just writing Kim Kardashian poems in 2016, there was no book. And honestly, it sort of came from me and my mom watching TMZ, which is like the gossip TV show, and Kim Kardashian was on that all the time. I think she was a few years married to Kanye and just had her first baby, North. I never watched the tv show, but I was so cognizant of it in the fact that there were so many meme-able moments and clips of it. I always found Kim Kardashian fascinating, although I didn’t really watch the show. What I mostly found fascinating was, at the time, she was getting chewed out by a small but growing voice of Black cultural critics recognizing that she is playing into cultural appropriation or race play.
I think long before 2016 we were having conversations about what it means to be a sex symbol. What does it mean to adopt the culture of Black women’s sexuality and wear it as a kind of brand or performance? I found that really fascinating. At the time, I was 26 and was also trying to figure out my own relationship with body image and how it’s represented in the media. The Kardashians are probably too easy of a target in a way. I probably could’ve picked any other celebrity at that time, but they had just perfected the performance. They perfected the performance of this very rich lifestyle and [their] bodies are the brand; [they] sell themselves. I thought that was just a fascinating concept, especially considering how they’ve cornered the market on social media and images and Instagram; they just nailed it. I don’t think the Kardashians would’ve been as big 20 years ago because we didn’t have the technology for them.
Being 26 years old and watching from the sidelines, I didn’t watch the show that much, but watching the supplementary materials of their lives– all of the Instagrams and seeing the little clips on Youtube being shared by friends– I was interested in dissecting what their image means. Specifically, what Kim’s image connotes. Media theorists always talk about symbols in media. What does she symbolize? More importantly, what does she symbolize for Black audiences versus white audiences? What does she symbolize for audiences that are fluent in the digital age language versus audiences who don’t know a thing about Instagram? I found her completely trite and trivial, but at the same time incredibly fascinating. She is kind of funny. In the clips that I’ve seen of the show, she’s almost self-aware of how ridiculously lucky, wealthy, and strange her life is. I thought she just provided the most fodder to try to get into the ideas I wanted to toy with [as] a Black woman watching another woman and how that affects my self-image. How does that affect my relationship with other images of Black women or images of non-Black women performing Black-woman-ness? It became a convoluted journey at times trying to unravel these things, and also trying to remember that Kim Kardashian is a mother and human being and not just a product (that’s a complicated relationship as well). I tried to speak to all those things in this book.
ZC: I really resonate with the point you just said about being a Black woman and watching non-Black women perform being Black women. I remember when I was in high school and Kylie Jenner was gaining popularity, specifically because of her getting lip filler to have bigger lips. It was just hard to reckon with the fact that what’s on my body, and what’s on the body of other Black women, isn’t valued until it’s on someone else’s body.
JW: Nobody wants to pay Black women for– or pay nearly as much– for what already is naturally on their bodies. With plastic surgery, it just became this fad, and there's a long history of making Black women[‘s] sexuality animalistic [or] their bodies are seen as brutish. People used to talk about Serena Williams’ body all the time, and it doesn’t make sense.
It's a strange irony that you have Kylie Jenner, who is not Armenian-American, just regular White, completely reshaped into the mold of Black women. Black culture makers who have always had the big ass, the big boobs, the big lips. I think about the way some women in hip-hop have just tormented people with their “We don’t give a fuck. We perform our sexuality. You will pay us to look at us,” like Nicki Minaj, Megan Thee Stallion, and Lil’ Kim. I love it! And then it’s a very glamorized, sanitized version of the Kylie Jenners and other social media influencers who dress the same as those female rappers, and yet no one is assuming they’re these over-sexed Jezebels. Just so messy, and there are so many Black, non-Black, non people of color cultural critics and writers online who are understanding and seeing the patterns, but sometimes we don’t know how to explain it. So much of the book is me trying to explain this phenomenon of, “Why does everyone want to be Black but not want to be Black?” Why is our culture so cool, and yet people want to divorce culture from all of the messy, brutal violence and history of Black personhood in the U.S.? And that includes the sexual trauma, too. For example it means something when Kim Kardashian starts wearing cornrows, and then these big-name White editors at fashion magazines essentially claim that Kim Kardashian invented high-fashion cornrows. It’s pretending like you haven’t seen cornrows on Black women for eons. Why not give credit and props to Black people?
Something that’s so ingrained in the cultural history of this country is that we don’t want to acknowledge what people of color have given to our popular culture. It’s easier to make ethnically-ambiguous, or White women, or men uphold those cultural trends that don’t belong to them. Sometimes I think of White celebrities as museums– they’re just holding all of the cool stuff that’s taken from Black people or Asian Americans or any other ethnic culture. It really is a cultural mess, and we’re living in it and dealing with it. American Sex Tape™ is that one part of me that wants to make fun of how ridiculous that circus is, and another part of me understands that it has a deep, deep emotional effect on my self-worth. I thought that was important and I hope that resonates in the book too, especially for Black readers. It’s not as silly as it seems like, “Oh, it’s just Kim Kardshian in cornrows,” it means so much more because me and my sister wore cornrows and we were picked on by White kids in school.
ZC: I’m so glad you said that because one of the notes that I made, in regard to the opening poem, “American Sex Cento,” was how I was struck by the lines, “You may stand upon me/ but do not hide your face.” That really resonated with me especially after reading the book because I noticed themes of exposure, revelation, and not turning away from your true self. What do you see when you turn the camera on yourself? When you go from voyeur to subject. And then you have the book separated into two sections, “I love to watch” and “I cannot look.” Could you talk more about what drew you to these particular themes of being obsessed with watching but then wanting to turn away from what you were seeing?
JW: It wasn't until halfway through the book I started realizing that my true preoccupation wasn't with Kim Kardashian as a person but with just the act of viewing and being witness to something. I think that's a kind of political thinking. Throughout the book and throughout the poems individually, there's a lot of turning the camera. [I] would purposely try to start a poem with, “Oh, you’re looking this way, then I’m going to force you to look the other way.” You’re looking at Kim Kardashian, but I’m going to force you to look at yourself. I’m going to force you to look at me watching Kim Kardashian. I think in the history of mass media, the camera lens is very powerful and has always been. There was a time when it was limited, where not everyone had a camera in their pocket and could be witness to everything. And that’s been important to our cultural history of race. Who is watching the racism? Who gets to testify to what is happening to Black communities? Think about Ida B. Wells who goes down South because no one in the North believed lynchings were happening, or were as prevelant. She literally had to go down South to record it, to have a lens, bring it back up, and then people believed the tragedy. That’s a more serious intervention in American history, but I think about the way we watch sex and watch people’s bodies as well. There is a fascination with how we wield power over someone. I hold power by looking at them and holding them in my gaze. Feminist critics speak about the male gaze a lot, and a lot of the poems, I feel, are my speakers trying to wear a male gaze, or a gaze of power, on a subject, whether that be Kim Kardashian or myself or America.
There are also fun moments where I start poems with an ambiguous sense of who the audience is, who you’re talking to, and who you’re looking at. Specifically, I’m thinking about the poem “Nothing is Promised.” In that poem I’m going through this record of wrestling with capitalist gain and how that’s empowering for Black women, [as well as] my own experience. I came from nothing, I came from no money. I’ve been through some things, my body has been violated, but now I’m eating sushi, I got a White boyfriend, and now I’m coming into money. The poem is an “I” speaking out to an audience, but who am I talking to? And then in the last two stanzas, I flip it and I’m like, “Well, White women,” and then I start talking to White women and that’s me turning the gaze of the camera. I think that happens a lot in this book. I’m sort of obsessed with the act of witness and how that changes our relationships [from] how we see each other to how we see ourselves.
I think we are a country that is obsessed with looking. [There’s] high surveillance, we have cameras and we witness lots of things. That has been incredibly helpful towards our social justice movements [like] recording police and recording acts of racial and sexual aggression. In that line in the cento, “You may stand upon me / but do not hide your face,” I’m trying to play witness to the harm that America has done to our self-image and to our sense of value and our beauty. But, I think anyone can see that America has put a camera lens on us and told us how to act, and told us how to dance for them. Then, you forget that you don’t have to do any of that. You don’t have to play into any stereotypes of race or sex. You don’t have to play into this hunger for more money and exploitation. I think America hides its face a lot. We say we’re the greatest nation in the world, and yet we have so much social breakdown just because we don’t treat people fairly based on very arbitrary things like your skin color or your gender. For me, the ideas of witnessing, viewing, seeing, looking, gazing, and ogling keep coming back in a lot of these poems because I’m trying to nail it down: that there is power in looking out, but there’s also a strange bravery in looking inward and seeing how you’ve been duped and how you’ve tricked yourself. Screens and mirrors and looking are huge motifs throughout [the book].
ZC: I think you definitely nailed it. I was in awe of your ability to shift the camera to different points of view. Especially in the latter half of the book, which really forced me to kind of look inwards as well. I think it's so easy to look at people like the Kardashians or whomever and think it’s all nonsensical, but then when you turn inwards and just realize that it really does make a difference.
JW: I want to talk a little bit about my experience writing American Sex Tape™ with, first, Ed Roberson who's an amazing poet. He's a legend. I had a one-on-one workshop with him early, so he saw early versions of the book, and then with Simone Muench. One thing that came back to me about the theme of looking and witnessing and playing the camera as a poet was this question of, “Will Kim Kardashian even matter in several years?” I was like, “Well she's a cultural icon” and Ed Roberson was like “No, but does she matter?” [I was] spending so much time watching Kim Kardashian and writing to that act of watching at some point Roberson was like, “I challenge you to look away from her. I think you'll get a better book if you don't make the whole thing about satirizing and viewing Kim Kardashian and the Kardashians.”
Simone emphasized that later when the book was almost done and was like, “Okay, where are you? When do you turn the camera away from Kim Kardashian?” At some point, the critique became true to me. The media subject being Kim Kardashian, the brand, the image, the identity, you can rip her to shreds and satirize her all you want, but ultimately, there needed to be that turning of the camera back to the viewer, be it myself or whoever's reading this book and embodying the “I” subject of any of these poems and then reassessing: Why do you need to watch? What do you gain? How do you watch yourself? I didn’t come to that shift away from the Kardashian poems to a more personal-as-political poetry without the help of Ed Roberson and Simone Muench who, from the outside looking in, were like, “Okay, now it's time to turn your lens towards something else, to something you know better which is yourself.”
ZC: What was that experience like? Moving away from the Kardashian poems and becoming more introspective?
JW: It was so hard. Going back to my earlier memories of falling in love with poetry, I liked history poems. I was kind of nerdy in that way, there’s nothing personal or confessional to those poems. Also, I started the book when I was 26 and finished it right before I turned 30, so there was a lot of life lived in the interim. A lot of shit just happened to me, negative and positive, so it made no sense to my mentors and my professors that I wasn't writing more about myself and not being more introspective. They were like, “Kim Kardashian poems are funny and they’re snappy and satirical, but where are you? I think you’re more fascinating than the subject that you’re harping on in this book.” It was really hard to see myself on the page. Sometimes, you write little tricks in the creation of the poem that try to keep your distance yourself from the hard truth of the poem, or protect your own peace, whether that’s using dark humor or how you break lines or trying to create frustration on the page.
The poem “My Sister Says (“Everyone Can Catch This Smoke”)” that's based on a deeply painful sexual assault that I suffered in 2019, and I couldn't write about it for a very long time. I also wrestled with the idea of whether it should even belong in this book. At that point, I wasn't writing really about myself that much, it was a satire of Kim Kardashian and celebrity culture. There is a very mysterious but also artistic, spiritual, emotional, and physical pull toward something horrible that has happened to me, and my brain can't stop me from wanting to write it down and get to the bottom of it. That poem is probably the only poem in there that is really trying to disguise and turn away. There are black-out bars, there are lines you don’t see, there are lots of interruptions of thought, [and] the lines are staccato. I'm trying to write around the trauma, and I’m also trying to make the reader feel that same disorientation as well. That's a difficult poem to process, but Simone had such a positive response to it and she was like, “Yes, now the book is turning and now you are getting to the bottom of yourself in that introspection about your own body and who you are and about exploitation and violation that can happen in the process of being a witness to something.”
From there on, I felt almost safe to start writing poetry about myself. I think students of literature will call it “Confessional Poetry” or whatever you want to call it, but it was kind of a relief to feel like [I] have permission to be introspective. No one ever told me I couldn’t, I put that artificial restraint on myself from the beginning like “I'm writing a full satire about Kim Kardashian.” When in fact, that's not what I needed at the time as a person. I just needed to write about my own coming of age. But, it's also not what I needed as a poet to grow.
It’s funny, as a book that took so long to write, sometimes I go through it and I can tell which ones the older poems are. Like the really old poems stick out like a sore thumb to me obviously because I know when I wrote them, but trying to structure the book itself, [I’m] trying to hide the fact that naive Jameka is on page 19, but mature Jameka is on page 60. It kind of gives the book more meaning to me in a way. It's my first book and a lot of change and evolution happened to me and I can kind of see it in my writing, so that's very interesting.
ZC: Yeah, the latter half of the book resonated with me so deeply. I love the closing poem, “Since I Laid My Burden Down.” I did want to get back to the point where you mentioned form, from line breaks to black-outs. You use a lot of different forms and structures throughout the book, so I was wondering how you decide on what container the poem is going to go in. Whether it’s going to be a prose poem or you use slashes, how does your brain work through that?
JW: Now we're inside of my brain, like my psychological landscape! I think I'll start with how much of a novice poet I am. I've always been bad at closed form. I don't know if I have a tin ear, but I can't pick up meter very well. I always felt stifled by [forms] like sonnets because there are rules. For me, I always start with how the voice of the poem is feeling. A few of the early Kim Kardashian poems are supposed to be in a fictionalized voice of Kim Kardashian as if she is reporting to her TV viewers. I always want to start with a concept of how the character who’s speaking is feeling. How are they going to express their thesis or what they're saying? If they're hysterical, then the lines are just crunched together and where the lines break are shorter so you can keep it going. The speaker doesn’t take a breath; there’s no aeration between lines. It’s just dense text. That, to me, connotes rushed and hurried hysteria, and that’s what I’m trying to do in that regard.
For years, a lot of poetry came to me that way, which is, “What is the feeling I'm trying to convey?” If I'm trying to convey something of calm, then maybeI'll put more spacing between the lines, just to give the reader a visual cue, but also if they’re reading aloud, a sense to slow down and take in every word. If I don’t want that, then I’ll squish all those lines together and make tight blocks of text. To go back to “My Sister Says (“Everyone Can Catch This Smoke”)” like I said earlier, the black-out lines are supposed to frustrate and signal to the reader, “I’m not going to tell you everything.” Something has happened, something horrible has happened, and my sister in the poem is having an outside violent reaction saying, “I will avenge you in this way,” but I'm not going to tell you what happened in that space, behind those black bars.
I'm also playing with breath and movement. The second to last poem, “The New American Girl Doll is no Longer a Slave,” has those slashes. What I first imagined was this newly empowered, emancipated, come-to-God moment for a Black woman and she’s presenting a presidential speech to the rest of the nation. I [didn’t] want to write this as a prose poem, but I thought that I could capture the musicality of the sharpness of those images by slashing them and keeping most of those lines pretty short, letting them flow down the page. It’s very haphazard creating; I feel like I’m kind of been playing jazz a lot of times on the page. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it really doesn’t. I know there are definitely poems in there where I look back and I’m like, “That wasn’t the right form for it. It should’ve been four-line stanzas instead of a prose poem block.” What’s funny to me is that a lot of times during editing, the way I write by hand just stays behind and makes the final version. The poem “Consider An Animal” is a diary entry where I took some of the syntax out, but I just kept it in a block. I think there might be a couple of drafts where I was trying to find a form for it, other than this block of text, but I kind of liked it because it looked like my journal entry originally. I’m just trying to Jackson Pollock these poems, just throwing paint and sometimes you can see a structure in all that mess, and sometimes it just doesn’t work.
A lot of times I was writing by ear how I wanted the lines to sound and trying to recreate that visually on the page. But one of my undergraduate professors who I adore, Nancy Thomas, was like, “At least you’re always giving the reader something to look at. If you can make them engaged by bouncing their eyes around from line to line, that’s an active reading experience” I took that undergraduate enthusiasm and was like, “Ok! I’m just going to throw everything around here even if it doesn’t make sense.” Maybe if I ever go back and do a second edition I might try some sonnets or something.
ZC: It’s so interesting you say that because I'm always curious when people have books coming out if they ever read that final version and wish they could go back and revise.
JW: I've heard this so many times in workshops, specifically, considering the “difference” between poetry and fiction or nonfiction. Prose genres are kind of closed. Once you're done writing the book, the story is over. Whereas I think a lot of people feel like poetry is never done. You can put out different versions of a poem, [and] you can keep working on a poem forever. You might not publish all those different versions, but poems are never done. So, it's funny looking at the finished book and still editing it in my mind, but I am happy and satisfied with what’s there. It's just [that] my own brain is always tinkering with whatever I’m doing.
ZC: I do have another craft question. You have multiple poems titled, “Black Or…” and I’m curious why you chose to title them this way.
JW: That's a great question. I actually was inspired by Hanif Abduraqqib who has a series of poems titled, “How Can Black People Write About Flowers In a Time Like This,” from an experience in which he went to a poetry reading and there was a Black poet onstage reading nature poetry, and he heard a White woman murmur, “how could Black people write about flowers in a time like this?” and he thought that was such a ridiculous response. We can write about whatever we want, but there was an expectation from a White audience to have a Black poet go up there and just go all social justice on them. So, he wrote a series of poems titled after this woman saying, “how could you write about flowers at a time like this?” and he's doing amazing things in those poems, not only writing about the environment and nature but also weaving in a racial perspective of how it is to live as a Black man or Black woman in America, and I thought it was brilliant.
I really wanted to have a series inside of this book to speak to how I agreed with Abduraqqib in that moment, about this expectation that a White audience knows what Black is. They’re expecting a poem that namedrops Trayvon Martin or Mike Brown, and they can start clapping and feel good about themselves. The “Black Or…” series is me trying to mock that kind of thing. There’s a love poem towards the end called, “Black, or the Natural World Doesn’t Know Me,” and it talks about race towards the end. I wrote that poem during quarantine. I was walking around just wanting to write about pretty birds and walking hand-in-hand with my boyfriend. I thought it’d be clever [because] you think I’m going to write this big, political, “Black Lives Matter” poem, but instead I’m just going to write about me being in love and nature. Then, I end this poem that’s titled “Black, or…” with Radiohead lyrics, and to me, that’s my end joke, I think that’s funny. That’s what I was trying to do with that series. It’s very self-righteous or ball-sy to be like, “this poem is going to be about Blackness” meaning it’s going to be about whatever Blackness means to you.
The poem “Black, or I Eat Like a Butcher’s Dog” is my moment of [slamming] these images down about what you think Blackness entails, and what it does entail, and what we have made it entail. It’s this list of plagues almost of the Black condition with police brutality, with diabetes, with the fact that even if you’re Black, own a house, and have private school kids, you’re still Black at the end of the day. That poem’s more obviously political, but I think the rest of the “Black Or…” series tries to play with the idea that in the back of my head, I always had in mind for those poems to be read in front of a White audience and to try to make them uncomfortable about what they expect of Black folks and Black creatives. Sometimes I think White audiences go to Black poets for class [and] they want to be educated. I wanted those poems to be like, “No, I’m going to tell you what I feel,” and I’m glad those poems made the final cut of this book. For me, and my critical eye on this book, the series kind of sticks out like a sore thumb, but upon submitting the manuscript to the Brittingham Prize, I kept them in. I was thinking they would resonate, and they did resonate with the judges of the prize. I would also recommend anybody who loves writing poetry and who is writing a book to try and do that. Try writing a series inside of a book. It’s fun [and] it’s a new way to try to see your themes better. Not everything works, but it’s all trial and error and play.
ZC: When I was rereading the book, I picked up on how the word “God” shows up a lot throughout these pieces. Then, I noticed that in some poems you capitalize the “g” whereas in other poems you don’t. Why did you make this stylistic choice?
JW: I’ve been waiting for this question for so long because, for me, my personal struggle with faith was happening while writing this book. There are poems that are meant to suggest a loss of faith or even disrespect for God, and so when that lowercase G shows up, a lot of times that is me, recognizing that I'm stripping God of power or I'm trying to make God feel commonplace or just regular, like one of us, one of the humans.
There are a few times where God is capitalized because I'm trying to specifically talk to the tradition of the Judeo-Christian God. I was raised Baptist and I went to a Christian private school almost all my life. I'm hoping that context can help people pick that up because it was sort of a challenge editing the book. Once the contract is signed and now we have to copy-edit this thing, going back and trying to defend those strange stylistic choices that feel very much like Easter eggs for me is difficult; every joke or capitalization choice feels personal. Much of American Sex Tape™ speaks towards not only this erratic reverence for the Christian God. It was important for me to make that “g” lowercase and speak to smaller gods, but to also introduce the God into this discussion about power and messy humanness. It’s a little headier than it has to be. Maybe it’s a distraction, maybe it’s not, but I fought with myself to keep those choices in there.
ZC: In keeping with the theme of looking towards something, now that the book is done, what are you looking towards now? Whether that’s a new project or simply rest, what’s your latest obsession?
JW: I wish I could rest. Right now, I'm looking toward work-life balance. I started working in publishing from a fellowship last year, and now I'm in a new book production editor role this year. All of the energy learning the industry and learning my position has totally zapped me of real writing time energy, but I’m always writing. I have a whole book in my head. I’m looking forward to digging into some of those cutting-room floor ideas that didn’t make this book. I’m looking forward to actually writing those into prose. I’ve been wanting to take essay writing more seriously. There’s so much to dig into when you’re broadly taking on American popular culture and trying to stick it to the Man! I have so many more ideas, so if they don’t work well as poems maybe they’ll work as essays. When I do have some mental energy, and also if I can ever get off of Twitter and stop being addicted to social media, then maybe I can actually get some real writing done.
I think I’m most looking forward to the response to this book. Right now, it’s ok that I’m not writing as frequently and as regularly, but I’m also happy to have the break to watch this book live in peoples’ minds. I'm looking forward to the experience of [it all] coming full circle. I'm looking forward to it being in conversation with, not only friends and family, but other writers and people I don't know and poets who were interested in talking about everything we just talked about. Right now, I’m in “proud first-time author” mode, [and] I'm not doing anything else besides just watching this book flourish.
About Jameka Williams
Hailing from Chester, PA, Jameka Williams holds a MFA in poetry from Northwestern University. Her poetry has been published in Prelude Magazine, Gulf Coast, Gigantic Sequins, Muzzle Magazine, Yemassee Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is a Best New Poets 2020 finalist, published annually by the University of Virginia, and a featured reader on POETRY Foundation’s Open Door Reading Series. American Sex Tape™, her first collection, is the University of Wisconsin Press selection for the 2022 Brittingham Prize winner. She resides in Chicago, IL.
