There are poets whose work does more than live on the page—it enters your bloodstream, alters your breath, and teaches you something about the way survival sounds when spoken aloud. For me, Dr. Mahogany L. Browne has always been and always will be that poet. Her language doesn’t merely illuminate; it scorches, softens, and reshapes. It gives permission. It gives memory back to itself. It gives the wounded parts of us a new vocabulary for possibility.
When I was deep in the throes of writing my dissertation—excavating my own grief, interrogating the silences I’d inherited, and trying to imagine a pedagogy capacious enough for healing—I kept returning to Mahogany’s work. Chrome Valley, especially, became a kind of companion text, a map for what it means to write toward liberation without erasing the ache. Her lines reminded me that testimony can be both a weapon and balm, that writing is an act of love even when it trembles in the shadow of what tried to undo us.
One quote in particular stayed with me: “Every scar I possess is a love letter written in defense of my light.” It felt less like a declaration and more like an invitation—an invitation to see my wounds not as evidence of harm but as evidence of survival. To understand the classroom as a sanctuary. To treat poetry as a method of inquiry, reclamation, and return.
Mahogany’s work is a constellation of fierce tenderness—where Black girlhood is centered, where joy refuses erasure, where ancestors breathe through the margins, and where language becomes a mirror polished by fire. Her poems carry the kind of truth that rearranges the room inside you, that insists on the fullness of our humanity in a world determined to make us forget it.
In this conversation for Tupelo Quarterly, I had the profound honor of asking Mahogany about craft, lineage, responsibility, and the ways our bodies hold stories long before we have the courage to write them. I asked her about scars and survival, about community practice, about the transformative power of speaking light into a world that routinely tries to dim it. I asked her—humbly, gratefully—about how her work has shaped artists and educators like myself, who carry her lines into our scholarship, our pedagogy, and our own becoming.
This interview is, in many ways, a love letter back. A thank you. A recognition of the brilliance, rigor, and radical tenderness Mahogany L. Browne gifts to the world—again and again.
Darius Phelps: You recently shared a line that I really loved: “Every scar I possess is a love letter written in defense of my light.” It reframes pain as a form of authorship. How do you navigate the space between wound and witness when writing? What does it mean for a scar to speak—and for you to allow that language onto the page?
Mahogany Browne: Wow. Beautiful question. I don’t think of writing as therapy. I think of it as having healing properties—it’s therapeutic, but it’s only one wheel on the vehicle.
When I think about wound, witness, and writing, I’m aware that I’m only beginning the work. I’m naming the wound; I’m not treating it. I’m not healed because I named it. But I am aware. Self-actualization is the hardest part for most people. We don’t like looking in the mirror. We don’t like seeing blemishes or flaws. Wounds get equated with weakness.
So just by naming it, I’m toppling those misconceptions. I’m not putting some grand action on writing—it’s not enough, but it’s a start.
What does it mean for a scar to speak? It’s that self-actualization. And allowing that language onto the page—that’s the hard part. Writing it versus sharing it? Two different muscles.
That takes audacity, like Maya Angelou said: audacity. To be outrageously human. Unconditionally so. That gives you wingspan—room for breath, for expansion, for forgiveness. Self-forgiveness, especially. Forgiveness for others? Maybe. Depends.
I’m mindful of the social contract. What do I owe a space as I walk through it—as a community member, as a communal artist? For me, that’s language. Language tears down fences that tell us we’re isolated, that let people reduce us to categories—Angry Black Woman, baby mama, whatever makes it easier to look away from terror. Terror that is often made possible by the country we serve.
DP: Your work often honors Black women’s brilliance, resilience, and worldbuilding. How do you see yourself in conversation with writers who carried their own scars as torches—Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde? What light do you hope to pass forward?
MB: I don’t see myself in lineage just yet. I’m on their shoulders—maybe on tippy toe. They’re my pillars. Literary deities. Audre Lorde helped me understand my anger, especially toward higher education spaces—too much bureaucracy, too much plantation energy, if I’m honest.
I don’t know how I’m in conversation with them. I’m too close to the fire to name the flame. I can’t measure the heat yet.
What light do I hope to pass forward? I hear Toni Morrison. Octavia Butler. Sonia Sanchez. That’s who guides me. It feels dangerous to claim authorship over something I know I didn’t create alone. I’m archiving what’s happening now. I’m bearing witness.
The poem I wrote yesterday is the poem June Jordan wrote decades ago about police brutality. It’s the same poem Alice Walker wrote about Black love. I’m a link in the chain.
Look to your aunties. You didn’t create this alone. We are the fruits of their labor. My job is to plant seeds so that labor continues.
DP: Your poems remind readers that the body remembers even when the world prefers it silent. What stories has your body refused to let go of? And how has listening to that archive shaped your newest work?
MB: You gotta relax with these questions—this feels like therapy early in the week, damn it!
My body has refused to let go of what is promised when you are silenced—abused. Especially by family. Verbal abuse. The insidiousness of everyday conversations that needle away at your worth. I can’t disremember that.
I’ve recognized how often I searched for new family and fell into familiar trenches—accepting mistreatment because it was familiar. The devil you know. But the promise of that devil is the death of your spirit. I’m not talking about physical or sexual abuse here—those are real and devastating—but about the everyday erosion. If someone tells you you’re stupid for ten years, you carry that even when you test into AP Lit.
That’s what my body holds. And my new work reflects a refusal to protect people from their bad behavior. I’m also no longer blaming myself for accepting it. I’m placing it on the mantle—so I can see it clearly, without carrying it everywhere.
DP: Your work shaped the foundation of my dissertation and my understanding of poetic inquiry. How does it feel to know your poems live inside classrooms and the scholarship of people you may never meet? What responsibility do you feel toward educators building pedagogy through your work?
MP: I feel honored. Truly. Dr. Yolie and I often talk about your brilliance. To be in conversation across time and space—that’s the dream. That my work can tether itself to liberation in classrooms I’ll never enter.
But when teaching my poems, there has to be vulnerability. Are you willing to do the work the poem asks? Or are you going to remove yourself from it? Teachers have stories in their bodies, too. For the poem to grow teeth without the poet present, the educator has to put their finger on the flame and not turn away from the burn. Say: This is happening to me, too.
That commonality—that’s what’s required.
DP: Thank you. Truly. This meant the world to me.
MB: Absolutely. Anytime and every time.
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.
Mahogany L Browne is a writer, playwright, organizer, and educator is a Kennedy Center Next 50 Fellow, and the inaugural Distinguished Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University, she is also a MacDowell Arts Advocacy Awardee, NAACP Image Award nominess and a New York Emmy nominee for How to Build a City (All Arts). Browne has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Arts for Justice, Baldwin for the Arts, Hawthorden, Mellon Research, Rauschenberg, UCross, and more.
Her acclaimed books include Vinyl Moon; Chlorine Sky (optioned by Steppenwolf Theatre); Black Girl Magic; and the frequently challenged works Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice and Woke Baby. She is also the founder of the Woke Baby Book Fair, a national celebration of diverse children’s literature.
Browne’s poetry collection Chrome Valley, praised by The New York Times and Publishers Weekly, won the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize; and she is the recipient of the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Her most recent young adult novel, A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe, was longlisted for the National Book Award. Browne holds an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Marymount Manhattan College and serves as the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Lincoln Center.