Mitchell L. H. Douglas discusses Universal Corner with Erin Keane

About the Book:

From the author of dying in the scarecrow's arms, new poems powered by the twin musical engines of punk and Hip-Hop.

Dancing at the intersection of melody and humanity, Mitchell L. H. Douglas' Universal Corner imagines what beat moves the world. Douglas' poetry rides the skip and pop of vinyl, radio waves, and mixtape collage through a complex modern life, his voice equally shaped by freestyling and stage diving, having come of age in two seemingly different musical cultures: punk and Hip-Hop. These seemingly disparate genres reveal surprising connections in Douglas' poems, in which he finds that, through the experience of memory and musical communion, common ground abounds. Reconciling rage and joy, public and private, Mitchell Douglas is one of our most vital voices of the urban Midwest, a poet of with both a critical and compassionate perspective on the pulse of America's heartland.

About the Authors:

Mitchell L. H. Douglas is the author of Universal Corner, dying in the scarecrow’s arms, \blak\ \al-fə bet\, winner of the Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award, and cooling board: a long-playing poem, an NAACP Image Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee. His “Poem that Begins w/a Tweet About Gwendolyn Brooks” was featured in This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets edited by New York Times best-selling author Kwame Alexander. A 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, he is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University Indianapolis, a Cave Canem alum, and cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets. His visual art has been published in Callaloo, The Adroit Journal, and The Offing.

Erin Keane is a critic, poet, essayist, and journalist. She’s the author of the memoir Runaway: Notes on the Myths That Made Me (Belt Publishing), one of NPR’s best books of 2022, and editor of The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, 2020). She has also published three collections of poetry. Her writing has appeared in many publications, anthologies, and public radio programs, and she was co-producer and co-host of the limited audio series These Miracles Work: A Hold Steady Podcast. Her latest audio project is the Blair Water Literary Society, a podcast about (re)reading L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon, which you can subscribe to on your favorite podcast app. She is Chief Content Officer at Salon.com and teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.

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Host or Publisher Susan Norton