In Volume Six: Chapter Fifteen of The Program, we welcome Youngstown, Ohio-born, Los Angeles-based educator, community activist, writer, poet, performance poet, and author Barbara Fant.

Barbara is the author of three poetry collections — Paint, Inside Out, Mouths of Garden, and her newest release, Joy in the Belly of a Riot. For more than a decade, she has led poetry workshops for incarcerated youth and adults, people in recovery, and survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence, using poetry as a tool for healing, survival, and connection.

Contact Barbara:
Instagram: @iambarbarafant Website: barbarafant.com

Recorded Spoken Word Performances Featured Include:

Sunshine Lombre – Daydream
Instagram: @ladylombre

Tonya Ingram – Monster
Instagram: @tonyainstagram

Theresa Davis – Why I Do This
Instagram: @shepiratepoet Website: artisttheresadavis.com

Barbara Fant: Brown Bodies Bending
Instagram: @iambarbarafant Website: barbarafant.com

Barbara Fant: Medicine
Instagram: @iambarbarafant Website: barbarafant.com

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In Volume Six: Chapter Fourteen of The Program, we welcome Candace Marquez Green, a Chicago-born and Chicago-based community activist, entrepreneur, writer, poet, and author of the new poetry collection, "In Glimpses and Reminisces". Candace holds a Bachelor’s degree in Entertainment Business, a Master of Arts in Public Relations, and a Master of Business Administration. She is the recipient of the 2022 Chicago Defender Woman of Excellence Award, was named one of Crain’s Chicago Business and Black Women’s Professional League 40 Under 40, and currently serves on the board of the Chicago Poetry Center, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to poetry across diverse communities throughout Chicago.

Our conversation explores the many layers of Candace’s creative identity, beginning with her long history in pageantry. She reflects on what pageantry taught her about discipline, confidence, access, and leadership, while also addressing the more complicated narratives often associated with the pageant world.

From there, we transition into her creative history and examine the parallels between pageantry and poetry — performance and vulnerability, composure and truth — and how those worlds have shaped, rather than contradicted, one another. Candace speaks openly about growing up on Chicago’s South Side, witnessing addiction, loss, and trauma within her family, and how writing became her earliest and most honest form of self-expression through journaling and poetry.

The conversation then turns to her newest poetry collection, a deeply personal work shaped by love, grief, resilience, and self-discovery. Candace shares the significance of writing much of the book during an intense creative period, and she also discusses the experience of self-publishing the collection and the pride she feels in releasing a book rooted in lived truth rather than polished performance.

This episode is a thoughtful conversation about identity, growth, and the long journey from learning how to be seen to learning how to speak — honestly and on one’s own terms.

Contact Candace:
Instagram: @chosenpoetic Website: candacegreen.net

Recorded Spoken Word Performances Featured Include:

Porsha O – Trigger
Instagram: @iamporsheolayiwola Website: porshaolayiwola

William Evans – For My Wife Who Fell In Love With A Ship Buried At Sea
Instagram: @williamevanswrites Website: williamthe3rd.com

Ephriam Nehemiah – Inheritance of a Broken Home
Instagram: @ephriamnehemiah

Alyesha Wise: Untitled: To Black Women
Instagram: @alyeshawise Website: alyeshawise.com

Kenneth Something: Rape Poem
Instagram: @saysomethingpoet

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In Volume Six: Chapter Thirteen we welcome Amsterdam-born, Kingston Ontario-based Writer, Poet, Author, and Essayist Sadiqa de Meijer. She is the author of two acclaimed poetry collections — Leaving Howe Island, finalist for both the Governor General’s Award for English-language Poetry and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and The Outer Wards, a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. She is also the author of two nonfiction collections: the Governor General’s Award–winning alfabet / alphabet: A Memoir of a First Language, and her newest book, In the Field, now available from Palimpsest Press. Sadiqa is also the current Poet Laureate for Kingston, Ontario. This is her first appearance on the program.

In our conversation, Sadiqa traces her creative history back to childhood — from immigrating from the Netherlands to Canada at age twelve, and how those early linguistic and cultural shifts shaped both her worldview and her writing. She reflects on experiencing marginalization as a person of color in Dutch society, the challenges of immigration, and the humility and attentiveness those experiences instilled in her as an artist.

We talk about the deep imaginative life she had as a child: disappearing into books, being surrounded by storytelling, and how the desire to transform the private experience of reading into “conversation” was her earliest pull toward writing. She discusses discovering poetry in elementary school, becoming more intentional about her craft in high school and university, and the moment writing shifted from something she loved to something that felt essential — a part of her identity.

We go deep into her award-winning nonfiction book alfabet / alphabet, where she examines losing — and later reclaiming — her mother tongue, Dutch. Sadiqa discusses how language shapes memory, how certain emotions exist differently in different languages, and why writing this book was personally necessary. She also speaks about the difference between the inward resonance she privileges in poetry and the slightly more outward-facing awareness she brings to her essays.

Contact Sadiqa:
Instagram: @sadiqademeijer Website: sadiqademeijer.com

Recorded Spoken Word Performances Featured Include:

Jasmine Mans – You Gon' Get This Work
Instagram: @poetjasminemans Website: jasminemans.com

Bianca Phipps – Born To Embody It
Instagram: @biancaphipps

Lady Brion – I Talk Black
Instagram: @ladybspeaks Website: ladybrion.com

Javon Johnson – The Shotgun
Instagram: @javonism

Rudy Francisco – Honesty
Instagram: @rudyfrancisco Website: iamrudyfrancisco

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