Sarah María Medina’s contribution to the 2018 Jack Straw Writers Anthology is a collection of poems from her poetry manuscript Oshun’s Daughter. In her conversation with curator Daemond Arrindell, they discuss the decolonization of art and its form, responding to music, and spontaneity on the page. “I’m not knocking the sonnet, but for me I feel like it’s a bit constricting,” she says. “I end up feeling like I can’t breathe by the end of it. So, I like to think about . . . my brother . . . he’s really into rumba, that is a more open-ended form where you can have the beat change and break and you can go in to bembé. . . . And I like to think about how we can do that on the page.”

Music by Amy Rubin and Dawn Clement, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.