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Danez Smith: ‘White people can learn from it, but that’s not who I’m writing for’

The New Yorker said of Don’t Call Us Dead that Smith’s poems “can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination”. That imagination was honed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Smith studied before going on to form the Dark Noise Collective with other artists including Franny Choi, with whom Smith co-hosts the poetry podcast VS.