There are conversations that don’t simply inform us—they reorient us. Conversations that pull us back to the marrow of why we teach, why we write, why we keep insisting on worlds where every child and every family can breathe a little easier. My time with Phil SaintDenisSanchez was one of those conversations.
When I first encountered Phil’s work—his poetic lens, his devotion to communities pushed to the margins, the way he defines justice not as punishment but as presence—I understood that this interview had to be more than a dialogue. It had to be a witnessing. His art isn’t crafted from detachment; it is built from living inside the fractures of this world and still believing in our capacity to remake it. Phil does not hide from the truth. He meets it with tenderness, rigor, and a clarity that refuses to look away.
As I shaped the questions that guide our conversation, I found myself returning to the tensions that haunt and animate both of our practices: What does it mean to excavate one’s wounds without performing them? How do we tell the truths our communities carry without letting those truths consume us? Where is the line between testimony and self-preservation? Phil navigates these questions across multiple mediums—poetry, performance, community organizing, and public scholarship—each one offering a different way to breathe life into the work. Watching him move between the page, the body, the room, and the community, I’m struck by how each medium expands his capacity to love, to disrupt, to build. His practice is not disciplinary—it is devotional. It recognizes that the body can be archive, ritual, instrument, and a sanctuary all at once.
Yet, for all the ache carried in his work, there is also possibility. Phil creates from a lineage—ancestral, cultural, communal—that survived by insisting on softness in a world that demanded hardness. He writes and organizes with an eye toward the future, imagining himself into the lineage of ancestors who believed that freedom is a birthright, not a privilege. Our conversation moves through the intricacies of teaching, the politics of visibility, the exhaustion and wonder of enacting change and justice within institutional structures, and the relentless hope required to believe in freer worlds. Phil’s work reminds us that justice is not theoretical—it is a practice of love. It is the slow, necessary, sacred labor of returning people to themselves.
“Justice as Love in Action” felt like the only title that honored what Phil brings to the page, the stage, and the community. This interview is not merely about craft. It is about survival. It is about legacy. It is about the radical act of building worlds held together by care. I invite you to enter this conversation with an open heart. Let Phil’s words be a compass. Let them provoke, soothe, challenge, and remind you— that when we do this work well, our art becomes love made visible.
Darius Phelps: Your work moves with this ancestral pulse—tender, deeply embodied. When you’re writing toward grief, memory, or lineage, what sensations or rituals guide you back to the page? What does your body teach you about truth-telling when language feels too small?
Phil SaintDenisSanchez:
Oh man, that is such a great question.
Ancestry is so important in my work. That’s why I have such an extensive notes section in the book—because I want readers to see the research, the lineage, the threads I’m pulling. One of my favorite compliments ever came after a reading for the Accent Sisters. Heather—who invited me—told me my work made her feel closer to her ancestors. And I was like... wow. That’s powerful. That’s exactly what I hope the work does. I want it to be a portal.
It’s why the book is called Our Bodies, not My Bodies. I want people to feel themselves inside it. To feel their own ancestral river moving. In terms of rituals—right before this interview, I made ceremonial cacao and invoked my ancestors. It might sound woo, but it’s real. I have Mexican ancestry from Coahuila—my 7th-great-grandmother came to Louisiana in the early 1700s. I have an ancestral altar in my apartment. I speak to them, I make offerings. Anytime I’m going into deep writing or deep editing, I call them in.
As for grief... I think grief and the capacity for love are inextricable. The more space you make for grief, the more space you have to give and receive love. My older brother passed away when I was ten. That grief never leaves; it just changes shape. Sometimes it returns as something sharper, sometimes softer. Sometimes as transformation.
Honestly, especially for writers, ancestral grief pours through too. It’s not always “this specific relative died.” Sometimes it’s trauma that predates you. You’re just the vessel it’s moving through on its way to becoming something else. I could talk about this for hours, but... I’ll stop there.
DP: Across your poems, I feel a refusal to look away—especially from the violences and silences that shape us. How do you navigate the tension between personal excavation and self-preservation? Where do you draw the line between what must be protected and what must be witnessed?
PSDS: Man. These questions are just... piercing. Thank you. For me, it’s intuitive. But I also feel a deep responsibility to tell the stories I can speak to—because someone out there needs them.
The hardest poem in the collection is middle school and other initiations, recently published in The Adroit Journal. In it, I write about being the victim of sexual abuse and other traumatic events. It was brutal to write. Brutal. I edited it who knows how many times. I workshopped it—which was its own kind of hell. (laughs ruefully) Bringing that into a workshop... whew.
But I knew I had to write it. For anyone who experienced sexual trauma. I read that men are something like 6.5 times less likely to report. The system around sexual abuse is horrifying. So I wanted to stand strong in that poem. To write it vulnerably—but from a place of empowerment. Not performative empowerment—real empowerment. The kind that says: this happened, and I’m still here, and I’m not ashamed.
I hoped one person—just one—might read it and feel something shift. There’s always self-preservation, too. When I posted it on Instagram, I was like... okay, this is unlike anything else on my feed. But I felt the responsibility to be real.
DP:
We need more of that. Truly. It takes another level of strength to not only write it but post it—to let people see it.
PSDS: Thank you. That means a lot.
DP: You work across poetry, performance, and community practice. How does moving between mediums shift the way you think about craft, audience, responsibility? Was there a moment when one form gave you permission another couldn’t?
PSDS: So—responsibility is a huge part of this, but permission is too.The medium that gives me the most permission? Music.
Music unlocks something ecstatic—not in the party sense, but in the etymological sense: ek-stasis, out of immobility. . Movement. Release. When I write, I listen to one song on repeat. One. Over and over. The cadence, the chord progression—they create a portal I can step into on the page.
When I read aloud, I’m thinking of the voice as an instrument. I studied music theory and composition in undergrad. I sang for my juries. So the body—the sonic body—is part of how I write. A few weeks ago, I was reading for Adroit. I went to my keyboard player’s house—we were trying to do this whole setup so people could hear him play under my reading. It didn’t work. I could hear him, but no one else could. But even that changed the reading. The music was still there, guiding me.
I asked Patricia Smith about music and poetry at her launch with Tyehimba Jess. She said, there’s always an undercurrent of music. And I was like—yes. Thank you. (laughs) Adrian Matejka said in a Bread Loaf craft lab: a poem isn’t a poem if it doesn’t sing. I live by that.
DP: As a fellow poet writing at the intersections of identity, grief, and liberation, I’m struck by how your work holds both ache and possibility. What do you hope readers carry with them after sitting with your poems? And how has this project reshaped your understanding of yourself as a storyteller, educator, and ancestor-in-the-making?
PSDS: I just want to savor the phrase ancestor in the making. That’s... marvelous. It grounds the idea. Makes it real rather than conceptual. Bringing the interview full circle: I want readers to feel closer to their ancestors. To their lineage. To whatever river runs behind them.
I deeply believe you can call upon your ancestors every day—for guidance, for connection, for love. And that you have to give back, too. It’s a two-way street.
I also believe, profoundly, that justice is love in action. And I want people to feel that through my work—not just the idea of it, but the experience of it. The fire of it.
When I was five or six, my dad explained homelessness to me for the first time. I’d never understood that some people didn’t have a place to return to. I remember being beside myself. Like, my body couldn’t comprehend the injustice of it. And I think that fire—that gap between the world as it is and the world as it could be—has always lived in me.
Restorative justice, accountability, refusing shame... all of that is part of the book. I didn’t want to shy away from any uncomfortable truth. Not one. I want readers to feel the transmutative power of poetry and music and witness. I want the poems to live in their bodies. Not as an intellectual exercise, but as something embodied. A spell. A practice.
There’s a poem—spell to recover the body—where I literally say “repeat after me.” Because I want these poems carried into people’s daily lives. I also want readers to imagine what lies on the other side of empire. I don’t think the fall of empire has to be apocalypse. I think it might be a quiet surrender. A whimper. A moment where we realize we’ve woken into a new world. A world where possibility has been waiting for us.
Humanity is still in its adolescence. We have so much potential we haven’t touched yet. The dark and the light both live in us—but time moves in ways we don’t expect.I want my poetry to illuminate the trajectories we haven’t walked yet. To help reify the ones we could.
Dr. Darius Phelps (he/him) is the author of My God’s Been Silent (Writ Large Press, 2026) and The Holy Ghost Lives In Her Laugh (Kith Books, 2026). A poet before anything else, his work bears witness to grief, faith, and the act of becoming—offering language as a form of liberation and light. Through the lens of poetic inquiry, Dr. Phelps explores how verse can function as pedagogy, healing and survival. Rooted in Black literary traditions and personal testimony, his poems navigate silence, ancestry, and resilience, creating sanctuaries for voices too often unheard. His work has been featured by Diode, Een Magazine, School Library Journal, and many more across platforms that champion the power of story to honor every body, every history, and every voice.
Phil SaintDenisSanchez is a Creole poet from New Orleans. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, Poetry International, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His poem “monarchs are the communication medium for when i die” was a finalist for Poetry International’s C.P. Cavafy Prize and his chapbook “watch out for falling bullets” was a finalist for The Atlas Review’s and Button Poetry’s chapbook contests, and a notable manuscript for BOAAT’s chapbook contest. A semifinalist for the 2020 Discovery Prize, he has received scholarships to attend Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and presented at AWP on creating collaborations between poetry and music. Button Poetry recently published his debut collection, before & after our bodies, in 2025. He studied music theory and composition at The City College of New York, records under the name SaintDenisSanchez, and currently lives in Brooklyn.