Husnaa Hashim is the author of Honey Sequence published by The Head & The Hand, a nonprofit, independent publishing company and writers’ workshop based in Philadelphia. She was the 2017-2018 Youth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia and is a former attendee at the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshops. Husnaa competed with the Philly Youth Poetry Movement at the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in 2016 and has performed at numerous conferences and colleges. She has received 20+ recognitions from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, including a National American Voices Medal awarded at Carnegie Hall. She is also the recipient of a 2018 “Dare to Understand” Award from Interfaith Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in RookieMag, KidSpirit Online, New Moon Girls Media, the Kenyon Young Writers Anthology, the Voices of the East Coast Anthology, and APIARY 9 . (You can read “Song for a Dark Girl” in their archives.) Previously, she’s served as a Student Group Leader for Interfaith Philadelphia’s youth initiative “Walking the Walk,” and as a Teen Council member for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. She is currently in her first year at the University of Pennsylvania and works at The Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus.
Kirsten Ogden spoke with Husnaa Hashim through social media and on the phone over a period of several months in 2018 and 2019. Kirsten Ogden is Husnaa’s former workshop instructor for the Kenyon Review Young Writers program.
Husnaa! It’s so great to hear your voice! Remind me how long ago you were at the Young Writers workshops. Has it been 2 years?
I was going into my junior year of high school after that summer, so it was almost 3 years ago!
I found an old email from you to me just after that summer workshop – it was so lovely and was accompanied by lots of pictures, and my favorite was of you kneeling in the grasses with a bouquet of flowers. You wrote:
7/30/2016
“My body
writes into your flesh
the poem you make of me.”
–Audre Lorde
I am headed home from the Kenyon College Young Writers Program. I am so blessed. 96 young writers from around the world convened for 2 weeks at Kenyon College in rural Gambier, Ohio to write with professionals for over 6 hours a day. We were not allowed to have electronics in our writing workshops. Instead, we wrote with pen and paper. . . My favorite thing to do was to write beneath trees and press roses and leaves into my journal. . .
What I remember about you that summer was that you were this old soul kind of kid – you were quiet and contemplative, but also very curious and playful at times.
It’s funny to hear you say I was quiet! I remember being more outgoing that summer because I’m normally so introverted. What I remember from that summer was feeling terribly nostalgic and sentimental after leaving Kenyon. I had a feeling of a healthy loss, and I don’t really remember writing this, but I have the feeling embodied in my memory. It was an amazing experience and a blessing having you as my instructor because you helped the structureless-structure of the program foster an intense level of retrospection within me!
That is so sweet. It’s hard to hear you say you felt you were more outgoing that summer since you are such an accomplished Slam poet. In fact, you had just come from some big Slam Poetry competition, if I remember — Brave New Voices?
Yes, that’s right. I was on the Philly Slam team and actually flew from that competition in DC right to Gambier, Ohio with my mom. So I was coming to Kenyon off of this high of being around 600 young poets from around the world and sharing the poems with them – to this place in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere with nothing else to do but write and think and read!
Tell me a little bit about how you got into Slam Poetry, because you’ve actually only been doing it a short time, right?
Right. I was aware of the Philly poetry scene, and I was aware of these groups around Philly that helped facilitate Slam and had won various competitions. People are always aware of Philly’s Slam power – it’s really well known for Slam. I felt at the time when I was 15 and 16 that I didn’t understand really the style, but I knew that I was intrigued by it. I had just won some of the Scholastic Awards – actually, that’s how I got into the Kenyon Young Writers program – through a scholarship through them. Anyway, the Philadelphia Writing Project had an open mic partnered with several other organizations and hosted by Matthew Kay who encouraged me to come to some Saturday workshops on Slam Poetry – but I saw they had their first slam of the season coming up soon, so I thought I’d just go to that and do it. It’s funny because I didn’t know what I was doing. Slam has these rules where you have rounds, and the judges give points and they throw out the best and worst score — and so I performed a poem and made the second round and I was told that that had never happened before in this organization’s slam history, that someone who was doing it for their first time would make it through to the second round. I didn’t know there were two rounds and so I’m not sure I even had a second poem ready!
But it was a great experience and I met a lot of people and so I started coming back. I didn’t initially make the Philly team, but at the end of the season was fortunate enough to get an opportunity to join the team shortly before competition at Brave New Voices Spoken Word festival.
That must’ve been a real surreal experience for someone fairly new to the world of Slam poetry. How’d your team end up doing?
We made the semi-finals at the DC competition, but it was very dramatic! It was a good time though, and I definitely think that Brave New Voices was a release that I’d been working towards for almost a year.
Yes—and it sounds like that release kind of moved you into a deeper place with your writing and also to a deeper understanding of yourself as an artist. Your last couple years of high school were pretty big years for you after the KR Summer Writing program – you worked a lot with the Interfaith community and you were named Philly Youth Poet Laureate. Before we get to that, I want to hear a little bit about your education and how you first came to poetry. What gave you that interest and love of writing early on?
I was homeschooled until third grade, and I grew up in a multilingual household. My mom has spoken Farsi to me since I was a baby, and I also took Arabic at my Sunday School, so language was very interesting to me as a young child. My mom would read me poems while I was small, too, and I grew up listening to audiobooks constantly! I didn’t learn to read until I was seven because I was listening to books instead, and then I did begin to read and by the time I was 12 I was reading at a college level, which I credit to all of those audiobooks. So – with my early education, my mom let me play and explore and sort of follow my own educational curiosity, and the fluidity of learning that way exposed me to lots of words and languages all around me, and that is what I think gave me this foundation for poems.
That sounds wonderful.
Yes. And I wasn’t without a community. We were part of the Waldorf Homeschooling method and so a couple of times a week my mom would take me to a co-op of mostly women. There were Muslim moms, Black, White, Egyptian, Iranian, Cuban — just all types of interracial families. There was a lot of making art and making bread and making apple sauce – just exploration. In this way I feel like I gravitated towards language as something innate rather than by choice because there was so much language all around me.
When did you first engage in poetry-making?
After third grade, I went to a private Muslim school for three years and we had this poetry teacher who came once a week. She was a Sufi woman who wore purple lipstick and this thick black eyeliner and she would teach us about poems and about how you can break a line and play around with words and I thought WOW! I wonder if this is something I could do, and so I started doing it. At ten-years-old I was published at New Moon Girls Media, a print and online journal for girl empowerment, and I didn’t care about being recognized for my poems, I just thought maybe I could do this thing.
Flash forward to your senior year. You had just shifted from your charter school to going to community college, right?
Yes! Senior year I went to Community College because my charter school had a partnership program set up. I really enjoyed going to Community College! Because we were still in high school we still had to sign in and sign out and we had to go to campus even if we didn’t have class that day, but I enjoyed the flexibility of being downtown and of having access to all of those resources at the Community College. And I appreciated it because I had some amazing professors there who helped me understand the transition between high school and college. I just took the regular senior courses for graduation: English, Spanish, African American History, Biology, Math – just the basic courses, but it made my transition to college a lot better because I knew how a college classroom worked.
Talk to me about how the Youth Poet Laureate happened amidst all of these changes and new experiences.
I applied three times and finally got it the third time. My principal nominated me, and then I sent in a bunch of poems, a personal statement, and we had to also write a statement about why the current Philadelphia Poet Laureate would be a great mentor. My year was between the outgoing Poet Laureate, Yolanda Wisher and a new incoming Poet Laureate, Raquel Salas Rivera and they were both so amazing. I got an email from the Free Library of Philadelphia and they were like YOU GOT IT! But I didn’t respond to that email right away because I thought, “Wow, this is really weird!” and so someone from the Library (who organized the Poet Laureate series) called me and said, “Hey, did you get our email? Are you excited?” and so I had to get it together!
I love that story! It must have been such a crazy kind of other-worldly thing! So – what were your duties as a Youth Poet Laureate?
The library would put me in touch with organizations and schools that wanted me to appear for readings – there were lots of readings, and we also had to create a poetry project that involved the city, which was a really great experience. The project that I did that was investigating and creating space for poetry as a survivalist practice. It had to be something that I was doing that directly connected to the city, so I was on the bus by myself going to all these little corners of Philly and working with people and it was a great way to get to know myself and the city from a different perspective. I asked kids and teens, “What is something you do that sustains you,” and they’d say basketball or drawing — the kids told me a lot about how these things we do aren’t just our hobbies – they are entirely necessary to our mental and emotional health. I wanted to bring poetry to them as one of their possible tools.
Your book came out of this award as Youth Poet Laureate, right?
Essentially the application that year specified that year you’d get a stipend and a book deal – and that book deal for a 17-year-old was a big deal. The press decided they weren’t going to do these books any more, but I still wanted my book! So I had to email and track down the library contact person and I said, “You promised me a book!” and they were very nice and ended up pooling together their resources to make it happen. The press that I ended up with was a small independent Philly press – The Head & The Hand . They hired an editor to work with me– Maryan Nagy Captan, and she is an experimentalist and really likes white space, and it was great because she didn’t want to restrict or change my content but support it. So I sent some poems to my Poet Laureate mentors first – and they didn’t have anything to do with the book but gave me feedback on the poems, and then I sent them to my editor and she said “I hear two voices in these poems – depression and identity – and identity is stronger” and that became the core of the book.
Yes – identity seems to be a strong presence in your work for sure – I’m thinking of that poem “Identity”, too – it’s so very powerful and unapologetic. You’ve said you were writing about “being multiple things at once – a woman, a Muslim, an African American.” All three of these identities, especially in our current contemporary time, are often marginalized, cut down, ignored, and very often, violently silenced. Is poetry a way for you to empower these identities?
Thank you. And I would argue the timelessness of identity. It’s only now that people who have not historically and systemically been marginalized are grappling with the reality of silence and multiplicity, but as a Black person I never have the luxury of escape, because my identities make up who I am; they show up in everything I do, including my poetry. I don’t see poetry as a way to empower my identities because I’m jaded by the notion of “needing” something in order to navigate who I am. Poetry is something I do out of urgency because it sustains me.
You also have said “Authenticity is very important to me: I am all the things I am, all of the time. I’m here in front of you in a really, really raw form.” It must be challenging to be that authentic, raw, and present all of the time while also navigating these various identities and trying to bring them together into this one person. It seems like being creative is a way for you to find a sort of foundation or a grounding in the world. Do you find that to be the case?
I’ve always felt like I have my writing and I have my God to sustain me. Writing poetry continues to empower me and also to save my life.
I’ve met people who were suffering deeply in a lot of ways, and I feel like I always see creativity coming out of that suffering. For me, poetry is inextricably linked to my mental and my emotional well-being and to my identity. I don’t write poems for fun. Some people do, but I don’t. I honestly feel that if I didn’t write poems, I wouldn’t know myself; I wouldn’t be alive.
That is a whole lot of wisdom coming out of someone so young! See – this is what I meant by an “old soul.” I’m sure, though, that coming to this kind of wisdom was hard-earned in some ways.
I’m very grateful for all of the opportunities I’ve been able to experience. I will say, though, that a downside of having so much attention and validation as a young person as a result of my art-making is that it resulted not necessarily in my ego getting big but in people constructing an identity for me that wasn’t necessarily a false identity, but it was an identity I didn’t have any say in. So, in that sense, it felt very weird, it was like, “Oh yeah, she’s this black muslim poet” or “Here’s this person who is a young person who writes and slams poems” and these are me, yes, but it just felt weird to have identities named like that for me.
That had to be strange. In a way, all of these people were simply celebrating you, but also, they only knew this one part of you, and a very small part at that. It had to feel weird.
I know young poets who have had this same experience like I have had. I’m lucky though because I still very much know who I am as a person, but I don’t know how much I want my identity connected to this thing I use to stay alive – poetry.
I think your book, Honey Sequence, really captures all of these identity issues and feelings that you’re talking about. How did you come up with the title of the book?
I wrote the title poem “Honey Sequence” in your class!
Really? That makes me so happy!
Yes! I added to the poem a lot and it ended up being three sequential pieces – a pretty long poem. So I had this longer form for the poem, but the way that the poem appeared in the book ended up being sections that were fragmented. My editor was like “What if we break this up throughout the book” and I liked that idea – that I would have these little slabs of text – little blocks of prose – and readers would be like “Where did that come from?” Plus I was visually excited by those little slabs of text contrasted with the white space in the book. That’s the Honey Sequence.
Were there any other poems from your time at Kenyon Review Summer Young Writers that made the cut?
Honestly, several of the poems I started at Kenyon ended up in my book – so Kenyon was extremely foundational in terms of coming out of slam and then writing for myself. I was in a space where, for six hours a day, I was encouraged to heavily tune into myself and to find a structure that I could tune into for myself. I’m so glad it happened when it happened because I think it really influenced me in important ways. I was able to meet all of these people who like to do what I like to do. In fact, many of the writers at the writer’s house at Penn were also at Kenyon the same summer that I was! There’s a level of continuity that Kenyon still has in my life, and the most obvious connections are in the poems that ended up in my book!
That’s a good transition place to talk about how you ended up at Penn!
You know, Penn wasn’t actually at the top of my list at first. Like all participants in the Young Writers program at Kenyon, I really wanted to go to Kenyon, or maybe Smith, or to Mt. Holyoke – I really was thinking about going to a small school, and especially a small women’s school.
Penn is definitely the opposite of those options!
Yes! Well, the Kelly Writer’s House at Penn does some recruiting, and then a part of it was that my parents wanted me to stay in Philly too, but ultimately, I now know that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be at exactly the right time. The amount of support here and the community here – it’s incredible. And also there’s the pull of the writer’s house and being able to work there and literally get paid to hear famous writers come read their work every day. That’s just incredible! And I have a strong community of writers here, and the Writer’s House has a small, liberal artsy feeling so it’s nice even though Penn is so big.
But you’re not going to major in English – is that what I remember?
I really like the Africana Studies department here and am thinking about double minoring in creative writing and Near Eastern languages and cultures. In my life and in the world, poetry is absolutely necessary – and for myself, I’m craving an intensive experience, which is why I’m excited about Africana Studies and excited about examining gender and sexuality. The Africana Studies department here was just ranked number one in the country and the program is interdisciplinary, so I get to take a lot of courses in other departments and look at Africana Studies through those different lenses. I feel like this is something that can really challenge me. English is something that’s really familiar to me, and I think I’m just ready for something really different.
Have you been able to find time to write while studying too?
I had the opportunity to take a poetry workshop with Simone White – a brilliant poet! I appreciate being able to take courses with her for fun without devoting myself to the full English major. Simone’s poetry workshop was an intensive experience! It was generative and so I was giving people my poem and having them write all over it and having these 11 perspectives to take home with me. It was crazy! Now I’m taking a poetry anthology course with Professor White and we’re going chronologically through history to study the different schools of poetry and to contextualize it within people’s lives. History is kind of crazy – I think it’s important to study this stuff and to supplement this content with things that are happening in the current world. In this way, I can absorb everything from multiple sides.
Do your peers know what an accomplished poet and performer you are?
When people find out I have a book or perform or whatever, they kind of freak out and I’m like, “No. This is just what I do and what I’ve been doing for years. I’m just regular.” Having recognition for my work doesn’t really affect my everyday life, and I’m really intentional about separating my work from my interpersonal connections.
Have you gone to any other summer programs for writing?
I’m applying to Naropa University’s summer writing program and really hope to be able to go for the full three weeks. That sounds like fun. I want to be challenged and to have an intensive writing experience, too.
You’ve done so much mentoring in the last two years as part of the Slam scene and the interfaith organization mentor and as Poet Laureate for Philly. What is some advice you can give to teens –or anyone really – who is reading this and is interested in writing on a deeper level?
Well you have to read. For years I didn’t read much poetry; I mostly read nonfiction. That influenced my poetry in a positive way, but I needed to read more poetry, too. So you have to absorb nonfiction and alternate that absorption with other works like reading poets you admire, and reading poetry that you don’t understand. That’s important. It’s good to read contemporary people who are really cool to you – but it’s also good to read work that makes you say, “Wow, this is really crazy! I don’t understand what it means!” and let yourself push back from there. Right now I’m reading Black Women and Self Recovery by bell hooks, and I’m also reading Hello the Roses by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge.
Okay – and everyone always asks you, I’m sure, but talk about your love of flower crowns—because in a way, I see some of your poems as little crowns of flowers – especially the title poem “Honey Sequence” (which is untitled in the collection). What I remember of that 16- year-old Husnaa in my class almost three summers ago is that she’d come to the circle of desks in our room and she’d sit inside the windowsill and she’d have flowers pressed into her notebook and a crown of flowers around her head and around her wrists too.
I make them for fun! In fact, I’ll be leading my first flower crown workshop later today! I actually have loved nature and flowers for so long – and at Kenyon the flowers and grasses were bountiful. I started making them to raise money for my poetry travels and I would sell them at slams and sell them for five bucks – even though I was spending so much more on the actual flowers! I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had really pure intentions. There are a bunch of photos of people from Slams around Philly in flower crowns – but aside from that, making flower crowns is definitely connected to my larger identity and art-making – they fill me with joy. I do make them if people ask me. It’s just something else I can do.
Click HERE to purchase Husnaa’s first book, Honey Sequence.
