Shaina Phenix, whose collection To Be Named Something Else is the winner of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, has been interviewed by Arriel Vinson at Shondaland.
ARRIEL VINSON: Tell me about your inspiration for To Be Named Something Else.
SHAINA PHENIX: I guess for this, naming was really important, so inspiration is literally pulled from things that I could name. Be that lineage, be that materials from my childhood or childhoods that feel similar to mine, be that pieces of worlds that I wanted or that I imagine, and then pieces of worlds that do exist in my hands that are tangible and in my periphery.
The title actually came from what ended up being the title poem. I wrote the title poem, but I was calling the collection Wherever We Are, God Is or something like that. But I had a professor who was like, “People are going to think this is a book about religion. But there’s a lot of naming going on in the book, and you have this poem that literally is called ‘To Be Named Something Else.’ Why is this not the title of the book?” So when I got that feedback, I sat with it, and I was like, “This is literally a book of names, a book of ways of making and unmaking names that I’ve seen Black femmes, Black little girls be called and uncalled.”