2017 Jack Straw Writer Jamaica Baldwin talks with curator Jourdan Imani Keith about finding her voice in poetry, adopting silence as a kind of armor, and the male gaze in art and literature. “Women’s lives are surrounded by violence; some of them endure it, some of them go through it, and I like the poets who don’t shy away from that. Where their skin is peeled back and their bones are exposed. I like that. . . . And I think it seeps into my own work.”

Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.