This week on The Write Question, host Lauren Korn speaks with poet Sean Hill, author of The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures (Milkweed Editions).
About the book:
Posing questions that belie their simplicity, Sean Hill’s new collection is rooted in our shared history, lived experience, and a speculative future. It considers how we fashion identities through formative relationships with history and community, with our ancestors, our children, and ourselves. These connections underscore our ties to nature and emphasize humanity’s seemingly inevitable turn to violence. For instance, a meditation on the white-headed woodpecker connects to knowledge of Black miners in nineteenth century Roslyn, Washington, and sparks an understanding of white-headed woodpeckers as “arboreal miners” with “a patch of red feathers / on the back of their crowns” that the speaker observes and “can’t help but see blood.”
This collection ranges in setting from antebellum Georgia to twenty-first century Alaska, from the Wild West to the Asteroid Belt in the twenty-fifth century. The exploration of people in relation to place excavates the complexity of heritage and privilege, fatherhood amid environmental collapse, and the inherited memories, abilities, hardships, and love that link Black people living centuries apart.
Taken together, these poems, queries, and possibilities paint a sensibility that strives to integrate itself into the known world, and through that world into an imagined future. In searching for answers that almost arrive, The Negroes Send Their Love reveals a heart as big as the home it seeks.
About Sean:
Sean Hill is the author of the multi-genre collection, The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures (Milkweed Editions, 2026), and two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods (Milkweed Editions, 2014), and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (UGA Press, 2008). Hill has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, New England Review, Orion, and Poetry, and in nearly three dozen anthologies. Hill has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana.
I think it was when I was living in Alaska and thinking about the birds that I saw there and that I’ve seen other places, and I sort of realized, ‘Oh, they have a big range.... This is just their summer home, and then they’re going to go back to their winter home. And I’m not moving that way, but this is a part of my home, too.’ And at some point, being wonderfully figurative, I was like, ‘Maybe if they think about time differently, maybe they just went to the bedroom, then [hung] out in the nursery, and then they’re going to go back to the kitchen,’ moving in a house, even, not just thinking about range. And I was like, ‘Well how can I think about place differently?’
Mentioned in this episode:
Blood Ties & Brown Liquor by Sean Hill (University of Georgia Press)
1619, the year a ship of enslaved people from Africa were traded to the Jamestown Colony
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes
The Expanse Series by James A. E. Corey (Orbit Books)
Sean Hill recommends:
Kindred (Beacon Press) and Parable of the Sower (Grand Central Publishing) and anything else by Octavia E. Butler
The Left Hand of Darkness (Penguin Random House) and The Dispossessed (HarperCollins) and anything else by Ursula K. LeGuin
Beloved and Song of Solomon and anything else by Toni Morrison (Vintage Books)
The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press) and The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (HarperCollins) and anything else by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Citizen: An American Lyric and Just Us: An American Conversation and anything else by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press)
Intimate: An American Family Photo Album (Tupelo Press) and West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press) and anything else by Paisley Rekdal; listen to Lauren’s conversation with Paisley, re: Appropriate: A Provocation (W. W. Norton & Company), here!
Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels and anything else by Kevin Young (Alfred A. Knopf)
In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 by Quintard Taylor (W. W. Norton & Company)
Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860 by Watson Jennison (University Press of Kentucky)
Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum by Mab Segrest (New Press)
Lauren Korn recommends:
The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures and Dangerous Goods by Sean Hill (Milkweed Editions)
The writing of Camille T. Dungy, especially Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster) and America, A Love Story (Wesleyan University Press)
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press)
The writing of Hanif Abdurraqib, especially They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio), A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance (Penguin Random House), and There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Penguin Random House); listen to Lauren’s conversations with Hanif here and here!
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, The Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe (Doubleday, Penguin Random House); listen to Lauren’s conversation with Dr. Goffe here!
A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars edited by Erin Sharky (Milkweed Editions)
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry (Ecco Press)
The collages of Lorna Simpson
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The Write Question team for this episode was Lauren Korn, host, co-producer, and editor; and Chris Moyles, co-producer, editor, and sound engineer. This episode is supported by Fact & Fiction, an independent bookstore located in the heart of downtown Missoula, Montana, providing books for all ages and supporting the literary community in Montana and beyond. More information can be found at factandfictionbooks.com.
The Write Question logo and brand (2022) was designed by Molly Russell. You can see more of her work at iamthemollruss.com and on Instagram @iamthemollruss.
Funding for The Write Question comes from members of Montana Public Radio; and from the Greater Montana Foundation—encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans. A hat-tip to Humanities Montana for supporting this program since 2008.
The Write Question is a production of Montana Public Radio.
