Morgan Parker on Telling the Hard Truths

Writing can be lonely work; WMFA counters that with conversation. It’s a show about creativity and craft, where writer and host Courtney Balestier talks shop with some of today’s best writers and examines the issues we face when we do creative work. The mission of WMFA is to explore why we writers do what we do, so that we can do it with more intention, and how we do what we do, so that we can do it better.

Morgan Parker’s poetry collections include There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé and Magical Negro, out now from Tin House. In this episode from the archives, Morgan and Courtney talk about representation and misrepresentation, writing into the vastness of black identity, and how hard it is to tell the truth.

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Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Paris Review, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Best American Poetry 2016, the New York Times, and the Nation. She is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow.