Joanne Diaz

Joanne Diaz (Photo Credit: Jason Reblando)

Joanne Diaz is the author of two poetry collections, The Lessons and My Favorite Tyrants. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her recent poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, New England Review, Poetry, River Styx, and Waxwing. She is the Isaac Funk Endowed Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University. She is also the co-host of the Poetry for All podcast.

Her poem “Facts in Review” appeared in Issue 30 of Superstition Review, accompanied by one of Jason Reblando’s photos. We are pleased to present an interview with Joanne Diaz below, conducted by Madison Latham, one of Superstition Review’s poetry editors for Issue 30.

Madison Latham: What was the process like for creating the mixed media?

Joanne Diaz: I created the collage that accompanies this poem during a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA). I am by no means a visual artist, and I hadn’t made a collage since I was in elementary school, but I knew that I wanted to try this, just to see where it would take the work. The black-and-white image is from a film that documented the Berlin book burnings of 1933. I had known about that image for years, and it haunted me—the way the face of the Nazi youth is facing away from the viewer, and toward the flames—and I used a simple color blocking technique to emphasize the shape of his body and he hurls the books into the fire. For a long time, I was feeling stuck with this poem, but when school boards all over the United States started banning books, I knew that I had something to say.

This collage is one of a few in the collaborative project that I’ve been working on with Jason Reblando. The majority of the word-image pairings in this collection are comprised of my poems and Jason’s photographs.

ML: How did you decide what sources to use for the poem “Facts in Review”? What makes a reliable source? What is your advice for poets that want to include facts in their own poetry?

JD: Well, the title of the poem is actually a lie. As I say in the note to the poem, Facts in Review is the title of a Nazi propaganda magazine that was sent to American subscribers between 1939-1941. I first learned about this magazine when I read Mark Monmonier’s amazing book How to Lie with Maps, which provides an analysis of how maps never tell the whole truth, and how often nations and empires use maps for propagandistic purposes. Monmonier included some examples of Nazi maps in his book, and when I saw his citation of the magazine, I read through every issue, just to see what was published there. I noticed something right away: the magazine was full of lies about Nazi aggression—lies that made the Nazi regime seem benign, even beneficent. So many times in my life, I’ve wondered what it must have been like to live in Europe during the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Reading Facts in Review helped me answer that question. It also helped me understand the rise of fascism in our own nation right now.

ML: How would you describe your experience working with one another on collaborative media? What did you learn from the collaboration?

JD: In brief: Jason’s photos came first, and my poems came second. For Jason to create the photos, he had to walk La Ruta Walter Benjamin, a difficult mountain pass that begins in Banyuls sur Mer in the south of France and ends in Portbou, Spain. For millennia, the Pyrenees have been the site of many kinds of crossings, but there are two kinds of crossings that interest us most: the trek that writer Walter Benjamin took from France to Spain in 1940 when he was escaping the Nazis who were set on persecuting him; and the walk that 500,000 Spaniards took from Spain to France in 1939 in order to escape persecution in Franco’s fascist regime.

As Jason walked the route, he took photos that not only attended to the natural landscape, but to the history and culture of the land as well. As I meditated on his photographs, I conducted research—on the Spanish Civil War, on the Nazi regime, on Walter Benjamin—and wrote poems that helped me to understand the terror of that time. Jason is often my best editor, and he provided a lot of important feedback on the poems.

When we share excerpts of this work in art galleries, we print the poems on vellum and position the photographs underneath the vellum. That way, a viewer can read the poem, then lift the vellum to see the photo that inspired it. This palimpsest effect allows the reader to think about the layers of history and language embedded in every landscape.

ML: We see that you both teach at universities in Illinois. How do you know each other? And what is the story behind the collaborative media? Have you done collaborative work before, and would you do something like it again?

JD: We’re married! Jason is a photography professor at Illinois State, and I’m an English professor at Illinois Wesleyan, just a mile down the street. We’ve never collaborated on a project before, but we’ve really enjoyed this experience and would happily do it again.

ML: What are each of you working on next?

JD: In recent months, we’ve completed work on La Ruta and are looking for a publisher. Meanwhile, Jason is creating a series of new collage pieces that draw upon archival photographs of the Philippines from the turn of the last century. You can see some of his amazing work here.

In just eight days, Issue 30 of Superstition Review will launch! On Dec. 1st, readers will have access to poetry by twelve talented writers: Charles Peck, Constance Hansen, Danny Rivera, Joanne Diaz, Natalie Girratano, Rebecca Griswold, Remi Recchia, Young-Yu Huang, Susan L. Leary, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Rachel Nelson, and Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhuar. Read about all of them below!

Charlie Peck is from Omaha, Nebraska. He received his MFA from Purdue University where he served as Editor-in-Chief of Sycamore Review. His work has appeared previously or is forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. He currently teaches at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.

Constance Hansen is the Assistant Managing Editor of Poetry Northwest. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Washington. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in: Rhino Poetry, Four Way Review, Harvard Review Online, Southern Humanities Review, Cimarron Review, The Idaho Review, Vallum, On the Seawall, Northwest Review, Mercury Firs, River Mouth Review, Psaltery & Lyre, EcoTheo Review, Volume Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle, where she was born and raised.

Danny Rivera is the author of Ancestral Throat, a poetry chapbook published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from City College of New York, and his poems and literary criticism have appeared in Washington Square, Western Humanities Review, Epiphany, American Book Review, and other journals. He lives in New York City.

Joanne Diaz is the author of two poetry collections,The Lessons and My Favorite Tyrants. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her recent poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, New England Review, Poetry, River Styx, and Waxwing. She is the Isaac Funk Endowed Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University. She is also the co-host of the Poetry for All podcast.

Joanne Diaz (Photo Credit: Jason Reblando)

Natalie Giarratano is the author of two full-length poetry collections—Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Waxwing, Mississippi Review, McNeese Review, and Whale Road Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, and was the poet laureate of the city from 2018 – 2020.

Rebecca Griswold is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson. Her debut collection of poems, The Attic Bedroom, is out with Milk & Cake Press. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Blood Orange Review, Still: The Journal, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and others. She was a River Styx International Poetry Contest finalist. She owns and operates White Whale Tattoo alongside her husband in Cincinnati.

Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a PhD candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review and as the reviews editor for Gasher Journal. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared in World Literature Today, Best New Poets 2021, Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi is the author of Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021) and Sober (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022).

Yong-Yu Huang is a writer based in Illinois, but she is originally from Taiwan and Malaysia. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Waxwing, Frontier Poetry, and Passages North, among others. She has been recognized by various institutions, including Princeton University, The Kenyon Review, and the Poetry Society of the UK, and the Hippocrates Society. She is the recipient of the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize and has been included in Best Small Fictions. She attends Northwestern University.

Susan L. Leary is the author of Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021) and the chapbook, This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), which was a finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and a semi-finalist for the Elyse Wolf Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Tar River Poetry, Tahoma Literary Review, Cherry Tree, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Pithead Chapel. Recently, she was a finalist for the 16th Mudfish Poetry Prize, judged by Marie Howe. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami, where she also teaches Writing Studies.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of the poetry collections Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer. She is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her work has appeared in Lake Effect, Smartish Pace, The Los Angeles Review, diode, and elsewhere.

Rachel Nelson is a Cave Canem fellow and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, where she won a Hopwood prize for playwriting. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the museum of americana, Muzzle Magazine, Pleiades, Radar Poetry, Thrush, and elsewhere. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s work has previously been published or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Crazyhorse, Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal, and others. The recipient of a 2022 Pushcart Prize, they have won awards from the Ledbury Poetry Festival and Bryn Mawr College, as well as received support from The Seventh Wave and Tin House. Their chapbook, Small Geometries, is forthcoming with Ethel Zine and Micro Press in April/May 2023. They attend Syracuse University’s MFA program.

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Joanne Diaz’s Facts in Review: An Interview

Meet the Poetry Contributors for Issue 30