There are conversations that don’t feel like interviews—they feel like coming home to a room you didn’t realize you’d been building together. This exchange with Andrew Chi Keong Yim , poet- educator, finalist for a 2025 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship,awardee of the 2024 New Voices Award in poetry from Washington Square Review, selected by Terrance Hayes, author of The Ninth Island (forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press), was one of those moments. Two poets sitting inside the mess and mercy of our histories, trying to trace the shape of return. Two teachers who understand that silence can be both forms of inheritance and injury. Two sons carrying the weight of families who loved us through what they couldn’t always name.
What surprised me most was how instantly we recognized one another. Our connection didn’t feel new—it felt remembered, like we’d crossed paths in another life and were only now picking up the conversation we left unfinished. There was something kismet about it: the ease, the trust, the way our griefs bowed toward each other like prayer. I don’t experience that often, that rare moment when another poet’s interior world reflects your own back to you—not in imitation, but in recognition. With Andrew, it felt like our stories had been rhyming quietly long before we ever spoke them aloud.
What began as a simple question about Ilya Kaminsky’s belief that a great poet speaks privately to many at once unfolded into a much deeper excavation—of displacement, of grief, of our mothers’ quiet sacrifices, of the tension between telling the truth and protecting those who raised us. We wandered through slam stages and childhood homes, through the ache of islands and now unfamiliar houses that are emptied of the people who made them sacred. We talked about what it means to write toward a life that no longer exists but still won’t release us. We talked about fear, and shame, and the double-edged beauty of turning family stories into public language.
What struck me just as deeply was the way Andrew listens—how he holds a question not as something to be answered, but as something to be honored. There is a patience to his thinking, a generosity to his silences, a kind of devotional attention that feels increasingly rare in a world of performance. With him, the pause becomes part of the poem. The unsaid becomes a third presence in the room. It reminded me that intimacy isn’t always built through disclosure; sometimes it’s built through how gently we approach the places we’re afraid to name.
And maybe that’s why this conversation felt like return: because in talking with Andrew, I found myself speaking from a part of me I usually keep protected. He made room for the version of me that is still grieving, still searching, still learning how to forgive the boy I once was for surviving the only ways he knew how. He didn’t rush the story. He didn’t flinch at the tenderness. He simply met me where I was, and in doing so, invited me to meet myself again. But above everything, we talked about love—messy, complicated, ever-evolving love. For poetry. For our students. For ourselves. For the people whose labor shaped us long before we ever learned how to shape a line.
This conversation, in many ways, felt like a rehearsal for return—not to a physical place, but to the versions of ourselves we abandoned to make others comfortable. There is something radical about being witnessed in that journey. Something freeing about being met with understanding rather than explanation. Andrew reminded me that return isn’t a destination; it’s a continuous becoming, a slow gathering of all the selves we’ve been and all the selves we’re still brave enough to imagine.
This conversation isn’t polished. It isn’t packaged. It’s two poets trying to make sense of what we owe the worlds that made us—and what we owe ourselves as we continue to write toward a home we’re still learning to recognize.
“A great poet is not someone who speaks in stadiums to thousands of listeners. A great poet is a very private person. In his or her privacy this poet creates a language in which he or she is able to speak, privately, to many people at the same time.” – Illya Kaminsky
Darius Phelps:When you hear this quote, what comes to your mind, and how does it tie into you and your own work?
Andrew Chi Keong Yim: This is a good quote. It’s interesting because I came into poetry through slam. And that really is the stadium, right? That was the entry point for me. I wasn’t actually writing poetry before that. A friend in college brought me in, and suddenly poetry was performance. It was competitive. It was public.
Even when I was writing privately at nineteen or twenty, it didn’t feel private. I knew the poem would be performed. I felt watched even when I was alone writing it. That shaped how I wrote.
I burned out. I stopped after undergrad. I didn’t write for about six years. When I came back to poetry, it came from a place of privacy. I didn’t have the same expectations anymore. I was writing between teaching classes. It was just for me.
Now it’s the language I think in. It’s how I process. When I started, it felt very not intimate because I was always writing toward performance. Now I feel like I have community without competition. I don’t have to show off. I can send something and say, I don’t know what this is.
I think a lot about privacy because I write about my family.I don’t come from a family of readers. I couldn’t name you a family member who’s ever read a full book of poetry.
So the idea of putting our stories into public space still makes them uncomfortable. There are things I write about that bring embarrassment, especially shared struggles.
So I think about creating almost a secret language—ways to talk about what I lived, what my family lived, without fully exposing their private lives.
DP: In Red Hill, you root yourself in place—the island, the water, the ache of inheritance. When you write from a terrain of loss and displacement, is there a shape of return you seek? Is it movement back to a known self, or an encounter with a self you’re still learning to recognize?
AY: I think it’s the second one. I’m still learning to recognize that self.The self I knew isn’t gone, but it’s complicated. I left for undergrad, and not long after that my family became unhoused. That lasted six years. They were living on the far western edge of the island. My stepdad built a shelter out of scrapmetal—he’s a mechanic, very resourceful—but it wasn’t secure.
Storms were scary. Fires happened nearby. Possessions were always at risk. Home became frightening.I had these rosy memories growing up, but later I realized my mom was protecting me from a lot. That’s another kind of loss.We’re not Native Hawaiian. My mom is Chinese and my stepfather Mexican. I’ve never been to China or Mexico. Hawaiʻi is the only home I know, but I understand my loss is different from Kānaka, Indigenous, loss. For a long time, home was a specific place on a map. Now it’s scattered. My family is in Las Vegas, Chicago, elsewhere. Most of my friends from childhood are gone. So the shape of return has widened. It used to be centered. Now it’s everywhere.
DP: I feel that deeply. Even my grandparents’ house—home isn’t physical anymore.
AY: Yeah. The thing that brings me back now is grief. Funerals. That’s usually why I return. And even then, it’s heavy. You can’t go back and find the same people or the same feeling.
DP: You write a lot about family silences—silences that protect, but also silence that injure. How do you understand your responsibility as a narrator when you give those voices form?
AY: I don’t know if I’m doing it responsibly yet. I really don’t know. I still feel guilt.Silence is my family’s communication style. Love was shown through work, through doing. Growing up, there were days or weeks where my mom and I barely spoke because she was working multiple jobs.
Now I’m saying things publicly that I haven’t always said privately. My mom will read this book eventually, and I know I’ll need to talk to her before she does. Sometimes I orderher food from states away. Like, that’s how I say “I’m thinking of you.” And now I’m communicating through poems to people I don’t even know.
There’s part of me that worries publishing could create more distance, not closeness. And honestly, I don’t always know if it’s worth it. I really don’t. I write from love. I’m proud of her. But she might read the poems and feel exposed instead of loved.
DP: With the teacher in you, how do you navigate the space between bearing witness and co-authoring a lived history that isn’t entirely yours? Does that awareness alter the way you write, or how you inhabit a poem’s moral landscape?
AY: When I taught middle school, my mentor teacher talked about books as windows and mirrors. But the idea stuck with me—that literature lets you see yourself and also see beyond yourself.
One of my thesis readers told me I don’t have a single poem that’s just me. There’s always someone else there. I’ve never really thought about my life as solitary. My memories are relational.
That brings ethical questions. Friends expect to be written about. Family doesn’t. I don’t want to use someone else’s story as a vehicle for my own. But I also don’t know how to disentangle my life from theirs. I don’t know if I ever will.
DP: When I read your poems, I hear a quiet percussive rhythm beneath the language, a pulse that feels almost like notes or prayer. What role does music play in your writing? Do you write to sound, to silence, or to heartbeat? How do you translate the rhythms of your cultural inheritance—the cadences of Hawai‘i, of childhood, of home—into the architecture of your poems?
AY: I write to silence, by rhythm still matters. Early on, I composed poems in my head and memorized them before writing them down. That came from performance. I still think about cadence, line length, breath. I like lines that are packed to the edge and then break. I want to say everything. That’s probably where the rhythm comes from. It’s not clean. It’s chaotic.
DP: Five years from now, if you could listen to your future self, what would they say about the work you’re building now—professionally, poetically, relationally? What part of you do you hope will have softened, and what part do you hope will still resist? Do you think the poet you’re becoming will still recognize the teacher you are today?
AY: I hope I’m more open as a person. My instinct is to close off. Writing and teaching have pushed against that.Two years ago, I didn’t really have a poetry community. Now I do, and it’s changed my life. I hope I’ve taken care of those relationships.I don’t think resistance goes away. I think it just learns when to step forward and when to rest.
DP: Throughout this conversation, I keep hearing echoes between our worlds—the poet and the teacher, the grief and the grace, the act of returning and the art of letting go. Do you believe our work, as poets, as educators, is ultimately about guiding others home, or about finding a home within ourselves? If both are true, what do you think we owe one another in that journey toward becoming—toward the place where language and love meet?
AY: I think both are true. But I’m trying not to treat home as something I possess.One of my worst impulses is turning home into something I reclaim through narrative. That mirrors the logic that displaces people. I don’t want a hero’s journey. I don’t want to exploit home. I want to let it stay unfinished.
I don’t even know if this answer belongs in this book. Maybe it’s book two.But I think what we owe each other is care. Not ownership. Not answers. Just care.
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.
Andrew Chi Keong Yim was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. He was awarded the 2024 New Voices Award in Poetry from Washington Square Review, selected by Terrance Hayes, and is a 2025 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, Bat City Review, Frozen Sea and other publications. Andrew is the author of the debut poetry collection The Ninth Island, forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in the Spring of 2027. He lives in New York City, where he is a public school teacher.