Amanda Johnston learned she would become the 2024 Texas poet laureate via an afternoon cell phone call on an otherwise typical workday in her home office. She’d been told that she was among 10 finalists, but she’d forsworn any hope of victory.
After all, in the 92 years since Texas first bestowed that honorific, no other Black woman had ever made the cut. She sat stunned at her familiar writing table surrounded by shelves of her favorite books. She immediately phoned her husband, her partner in all things. He swore in surprise.
“You did it,” he said. “You are part of history.” Next, she called her mama, the woman who’d long ago, in 1981, brought her girl to Austin, making Johnston a Texan.
But the fancy new title alone wasn’t enough for Johnston, who has long been an entrepreneur as well as a poet. She’s dedicated much of her writing career to helping build community, as a member of Affrilachian Poets, the co-founder of Black Poets Speak Out, and the founder of the Austin nonprofit publishing company, Torch Literary Arts.
“I wanted to do something that would amplify and support poets across the state and amplify and uplift poetry for everyone,” she told the Texas Observer.
She had an idea of how to use her unpaid platform to build something bigger: “Praisesong for the People,” a project through which she would recruit 70 poets statewide and pay them to write about unsung Texas heroes. In 2023, she obtained an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship (with funding from the Mellon Foundation). She then forged a partnership with the Writers League of Texas (WLT) to coordinate events, curate a website, and spread the word.
“AMANDA EXEMPLIFIES THE TRUE MEANING OF A POET LAUREATE.”
Becka Oliver had known other state poets laureate in a decade as WLT’s executive director, but she’d never before gotten an invitation like this. “Amanda knows everybody—she’s such a huge literary force in Texas,” she recalls. “And when Amanda Johnston calls you, you say ‘Yes.’ Whatever she wants.”
Praisesongs are already spreading: More than 30 poems populate the web page, though Johnston continues to recruit contributors.
“The strongest and most meaningful part of my poet practice is community,” she said. “There are poets who are doing fantastic work everywhere, and this gives them an opportunity to give people their flowers through their poetry.”
During a brief visit to Houston in November, Johnston settled into an easy chair, cup of java in hand, to talk poetry with the Observer. She was in her element inside Day 6 Coffee Shop, a busy downtown cafe run by Black entrepreneurs who keep their cozy backroom loaded with books. As we spoke, her sharp thoughts were trained on her vision of a collective positive poetic project. She wore a thick navy sweater to dispel a very slight chill, but the warmth of her personality radiated.
She focused on works shared aloud in a recent Praisesong event at Dallas’ Wild Detectives indie bookstore, recalling Sebastian Páramo’s poem about his mother, who also happened to be a school lunch lady, which includes the line “She taught me to season myself.”
April Sojourner Truth Walker, another Dallas poet, wrote about a kind cleaning lady who, in a moment of urgent need, guided her to a quiet place in a busy museum where she could privately nurse her newborn.
“She who says
you in there honey?
I wanna make sure you ok.”
As Johnston spoke of those praise poems, her thick head of curls often shook with enthusiasm. But her green eyes shone with tears when she recalled the work of Dallas’ second poet laureate Mag Gabbert, who praised someone she’d prefer never to have needed—the oncologist treating her mother for cancer.
“It’s praising specifically this doctor by name, Dr. Luu,” Johnston explained. “And in the poem she describes him writing the treatment plan up on the board in the hospital room and explaining what they’re going to do to fight for her mother’s life. And then he goes from room to room in this hospital doing that over and over again. And so what he’s doing is carrying hope into each of these family’s lives.”
Johnston remains grateful to her own mother who brought her on a Greyhound bus from her native East St. Louis to Austin when she was only 3. She retains sketchy memories from that long ride south. She’d been entrusted with a sack of apples, which fell from her hands at one point, sending the fruit rolling down the aisles and under the seats toward the front. Later she awoke to find the bus empty and looked around to see her mother beside the driver, pointing the way to the city’s bus station.
Johnston grew up in Texas, but she first began writing poetry after moving away to Kentucky. She earned an MFA in Maine before returning to Austin, where she and her husband raised two daughters.
As a Texas poet, Johnston has confronted hard truths, writing about officer-involved shootings, her own daughter’s fear of being pulled over as a Black woman, and the enduring pain that even pro-choice advocates can feel before, during, and after an abortion.
Johnston knew that her dream to collect an outpouring of praise composed by 70 Texas poets—straight or LBGTQ+, ethnically and racially diverse—could prove problematic in a troubled time filled with war, climate change, and growing divisions. Indeed, some poets she invited to participate turned her down, saying they couldn’t summon much to be grateful for. Still, she’s already managed to collect dozens of praise poems about inspiring people.
Starting in September, Johnston and the WLT began organizing events to present poems aloud. She encourages contributors to share praise poems privately or publicly with the people who inspired them. At the Dallas event, Logen Cure read a poem in the form of a thank you note to a revered teacher who had opened her eyes to a world of queer writers.
“Dear Dr. May,
I never asked you exactly how hard it was
convincing the English department to offer a queer lit course during the Bush years,
but I can tell you my life was radically changed
when you gave me the gift of my own context.”
In an email to the Observer, Cure praised Johnston. “Amanda exemplifies the true meaning of a poet laureate; she fosters collaboration and celebration, and she makes poetry accessible for everyone.”
The true power of poems, Johnston believes, comes from reading and hearing them aloud. The poet brings 50 percent, and the listener brings the rest—making it a shared experience both can enter.
At events, already held in Austin, McAllen, and Dallas with more planned, Johnston puts her own skin in the game, composing a poem spontaneously on each celebration day. One describes a young woman who greeted her at the counter of a Taco Bell on a particularly rough day with unexpected kindness. (These are drafts, though she promises to complete her own praisesong before the project concludes in May 2025.)
In the next phase, praise poems will be passed down to the next generation—in the form of a curriculum for Texas school children.
Johnston believes that some of our society’s deepest troubles are generational, passed down in our DNA. Yet she believes that hope can also be passed down. To her, the act of writing and reading poems is a survival skill, one that can help anyone touched by the words.
The post Texas’ First Black Woman Poet Laureate Spreads Poems of Praise appeared first on The Texas Observer.
