ANCESTRY & INNOVATION

TYREE DAYE Let me start by saying congrats on If They Come for Us. It’s a great book, and thank you for taking the time to do this interview. I have so many questions about the crafting of this wonderful book, but I thought we’d frame this interview around ancestry, craft, and personal narratives/historical narratives. Your work in film, poetry, and social justice shows artists that we are never limited to one type of art or work. Have you always worked in multiple genres and fields, and did they naturally start working together?

FATIMAH ASGHAR Thank you so much! I used to write a lot of lyric essays, so I’ve always been very interested in hybridity, the ways that writing can exist within and out of genre. I think that we have a tendency to trap ourselves in ideas of genre that are deeply uninteresting to me—I can’t tell you how many times