JASMINE is a poet and learning artist originally from Chicago, Illinois, raised in Northwest Indiana. She has received support from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA), Roots, Wounds, Words (RWW), and the Periplus Collective. She has publications in Obsidian Lit., Honey Literary Magazine and the Voices: A Sacred Sisterscape audioplay curated by Aja Monet. Her work is anchored in her love for Black women, and she writes to free her voice.

Jasmine Knowles (JK): Hi, Ajanaé! How are you?

Ajanaé Dawkins (AD): Hi! I’m well! How are you?

JK: I’m good. I’m so excited to talk with you today about Blood-Flex! Before we start, I have a tiny tangent.

AD: I like tangents. 

JK: Amazing. Earlier last week, I was listening to VS, and you opened with discussing zodiacs. And it made me so happy! You said you're a Gemini. Right?

AD: I'm a Gemini. What's your sign? 

JK: I'm a Leo. 

AD: I love a Leo.

JK: And I love Geminis. I don't fully understand the bad rap Geminis get. On VS, you were talking about that specifically, and you mentioned how people make Geminis and Scorpios out to be the scapegoats.

AD: There are some rough ones, but they're usually men. The issue is that men give the signs a bad 
reputation. 

JK: Mhmm.

AD: My theory is that the few that go astray be so infamous that they give the whole crew a bad name.

JK: Yes. That makes sense.

AD: Yeah. And it would be so bad, like, dang. We do so much good in the world.

JK: Yeah. I'm like, that's wild because y'all are cool people. Geminis are real chatty and very friendly people. I like that energy. 

AD: That’s why we and the Leos get along. We're a little flighty. Like, you know what I mean? But that just keeps them on their toes.

JK: Yes. Exactly. I was so excited when you got into the zodiac signs that are the worst. Before you even said it, I was like, Cancer!

AD: Oh my gosh. Domestic terrorist. 

JK: Yes. Deranged.

AD: And I say this because there are Cancers in my life that I love. Love down. And it's something. I was raised by a Cancer and a Scorpio. 

JK: I was raised by a Cancer and a Capricorn.

AD: Whew. See, these are the conversations we need to start having. Bump bios, bump favorite colors. What signs were you raised by?

JK: Yes!

AD: And who made up your household? Because that's how we start getting into the nitty-gritty stuff. Mhmm.

JK: Mhmm. I completely agree! Okay, let’s get into Blood-Flex. Again, I'm super excited. While I was reading each poem, I thought a lot about what you were doing within Blood-Flex concerning girlhood, womanhood, motherhood, and personhood all at once. And I think many of the questions I’m asking reflect that. But I was so mesmerized by how you were looking at what I'm presuming to be your matrilineage, and bestowing personhood on them in this beautiful way. Like, beyond just seeing them as your mother, your person. They are a person first. They are a woman first. They were a girl first. How do you see yourself retracing lineage throughout this book while examining all those elements?

AD: So, I have been thinking about matrilineage for a very long time. Some of the first poems I wrote when I was a baby youth poet were about my mom, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Even if those poems weren't always reflective in the best light, I was deeply fascinated with the lives of the women around me and how they played out in their friendships. I was deeply fascinated by this performance of womanhood and its implications. The really beautiful pieces, the kind of interiority I saw them navigating, the domestic issues and violence, the social violence. To watch the women in my life be deeply held and loved by other women, and then to sometimes be hated in the home and then also in the world. Knowing you're coming into that kind of womanhood was always fascinating for me. So I was always writing about them. 

I think a lot of questions around the ethics of my writing about them started coming up, and I originally started thinking about truly tracing my lineage when my great-grandmother got sick. I'm very fortunate in that I had all of my grandparents for a very long time and had all of my great-grandmothers for the majority of my life. They didn't start making their transition until I was over eighteen, and my great-grandmother, when I was 20. She had lung cancer, along with another cancer. And I was so terrified at that age of losing her voice or losing her narrative that I started interviewing her. I didn't know what was going to happen with those interviews.

When I realized I was writing about my mom, it felt like a natural continuation to start the interview process there. Part of tracing has been moving through not just my memory, but remembering that memory is communal. And so there are some things that I can't access. And so, I interviewed my mom. I interviewed some of my mom's friends because I was like, you know a version of my mom that I will never know because you knew her as a friend, not as a daughter, but also before she was my mom.

Part of it was me starting to work on what it meant to construct perceptions of her beyond my own while also honoring my own memories. 

JK: I love what you say about memory being communal because you have a line similar to that in your poem "Beauty Is a Muscle", which I was drawn to and connected with. You say, to flex is to resist and in the title you have blood and flex hyphenated. I’m wondering, how did you arrive at the title? 

AD: I was raised in the Pentecostal Black church, and there was a hyper-focus on the idea of the generational curse. Many of the prayers were about breaking the chains off your lineage and not making the mistakes of x, y, and z. It was this constant language around generational curses. And whether because of that, or other cultural things that were shaping my life, being young and just thinking I knew everything, a lot of the lens through which I was writing about my matrilineage before was primarily through the fear of repeating some of the traumas I witnessed them experience. 

I don't remember what made me fully arrive at that title, maybe a handful of things. There was a workshop by a writer named Acacia Salisbury, who's brilliant, on being the villain in your own story. But I just realized that in all of my work around them, I was centering on this concept of trauma. The original version of Blood-Flex was called “Heirs”, and it was a completely different book. And not that Blood-Flex doesn't deal in any capacity with trauma, but I was like, wow! What a wild thing to reduce my lineage and inheritance to, when there are all of these other things that I have also inherited and am walking in because of them!

Like, I'm a fourth-generation AKA. You know what I mean? My great aunt, Ruth, was the first person in our family to go to college! My great-grandmother is why, in a very small city within the context of Detroit, most of the people there went to college, because she was an educator who, at that time, firmly believed that education could make a material difference in these lives!  She moved to Detroit, raised three girls by herself, and did all these phenomenal things. I thought, how disrespectful of my work to then reduce them to the violence and trauma they experience at the hands of men or systemic violence, and then to say that is my inheritance. 

So, I started thinking, how do I language what is the opposite of a generational curse? When I wrote “Blood-Flex,” the poem, I thought about the idea of my lineage being a kind of adornment. So what does it mean that my lineage adorns me? They are the reason that I'm flexing on niggas, essentially. 

JK: Yes. Exactly. That is so deeply problematic that we can often look at everything the people in our lineage endured, and still say, it is all a curse, as if they weren't subjected to a kind of violence. You know?

AD: Yeah. I just love looking just like my mama, talking about breaking a curse, girl, bye. Looking and sounding just like her. And instead of saying thank God I'm fine, I’m talking about generational curses.

JK: So that brings me to my next question. We’re kind of getting into it a little. What were some of the challenges and the joys, especially, in writing Blood-Flex? 

AD: Oh, challenges? One of them is that I originally thought Blood-Flex would be my debut full-length. Reconciling with the fact that it was a chapbook, which is fine and lovely. It opens up a lot of freedoms and challenges the personal nature of it.

I was trying to navigate this book differently, more ethically than I feel like I have before. I had a different set of ethics. I would send my mother work and figure out where she was comfortable. I’d investigate what was important for me to share, and what was important for the scope of the project, versus what was just some poems that I liked.

Another challenge was trying not to feel disconnected from the work, because I'd been working on this thing that Blood-Flex did not end up being for a long time. Once I abandoned that and condensed it into a chapbook, I was like, "This is her. This is cute." Just realizing that it was just a shorter collection about my mom, and Black mother-daughter relationships, more than it was this long, sprawling thing that I originally thought it would be.

The joys have been sitting with some of the interviews. Having women of all ages and generations, I'm talking 60 and up, talk to me about their relationships with their mothers, or what these poems brought up for them, has been especially impactful. 

The lightness of some of the poems has also given me some breathing room, even though I guess there's not that many light poems.

JK: I think there are a few light poems in this collection. Because so many of these poems are so deeply personal, and about you or your mom, did your writing shift as you prepared for these pieces to come out into the world? Did you ever feel like, oh my gosh! Do I want to, like, release this? And also, whether the reader played a role in what poems you decided to include in this chapbook? 

AD: I don't know if my writing shifted. I think my process shifted. And, again, that's before I knew Blood-Flex would be a chapbook. But the process shifted in terms of my beginning to interview my mom. Right? Part of that was being like, dang, you've been writing about a woman for a long time, who you've never asked a question about anything you're talking about. That broke open some ethical concerns for me. The first question I asked my mom was, "How did you feel when you found out you were pregnant with me?" Her first thing was, "Nobody's ever asked me that".

The things I decided to include, or how I decided to include them, may also have had some fluctuation. And I don't know that I thought about the reader as much as I thought about my mom, which is always an ethical thing I'm negotiating. When I'm working on family work, I think about the reader in this way, once a poem or a literary work about my mom or grandmother or whoever hits the page, they are effectively a character. And they are a character for somebody else. But they are not a character in my life. And so, somebody's understanding of them, especially if they're not in a relationship with them, is confined to how I've presented them. There's no way in thirty, forty pages to have the full humanity of my mother and the way she's loved me, and the things she's done for me, and the sacrifices she's made for me, contained within that context. 

So, yeah, I think that I've thought more about what it means to usher the poems into the world while always turning it back on the reader to say that this is less for you to ask more questions about my relationship with my mother and more for you to ask questions of yourself about your coming of age.

JK: You do a wonderful job putting those questions back on the reader. The type of love you present here can be so complicated, and that makes the people you're talking about more full, more human, more of a person than a flat character on a page. Tiny additional question, but how did your mom feel when she found out this book is coming out? Like, that's amazing, and it's about her! 

AD: She has a combination of feelings! She is like, “Girl, why is it always me, bro?” She's very proud of me, which has always been a kind of tension. My mom, grandmother, and aunt are my biggest supporters, biggest cheerleaders. The women in my life are, period. I think there's always the tension of her being incredibly proud of me, and being, like, this is so cool, so amazing, and I feel exposed.

I sent her a copy of the book before it went anywhere. Every time it went through a new iteration, I was like, "This is the version that's going out into the world." I think the final straw was the cover. She was like, "Is that my picture?!" And I was like, "You said I could use your picture, Mom!" She was like, "I know, but it's different seeing it out there in the world and online!"

JK: That's hilarious! Of course, it would be like a mix of emotions for her. So, while writing, what part of writing this made it possible for you to bestow this type of personhood onto the people in your matrilineage?

AD: Bunch of moments. In my early twenties, I was venting to Britney Rogers, my best friend, about something with my mom. Britney, who was a mom at that point, said, "You give your dad way more grace than you give your mom. You don't do that to your dad. You let him be his own, full person with all of these complexities." I remember that conversation kind of shaking me up a little. Because of the intimacy of the relationship that I have with my mom, as a consequence of that intimacy, I scrutinize her in ways that I don't other people.

Honestly, life will humble you. I started to really think about my mother at my age. At every milestone that I've hit, my mother was a mother in navigating. Also, trying to support my friends as they navigate maintaining their personhood and being parents really shaped things for me.

JK: That's beautiful to have someone who will tell you that truth. And I feel like that’s the case for a lot of us. Moms get a lot of scrutiny, and they get it from all angles. 

AD: From all angles, from the world! And I'm like, wow! How wild of me to perpetuate that as your mirror in the context of our domestic relationship. I am my mom's twin. So, for you to produce somebody who looks like you, and for that person then to be reflecting the criticism of the world back at you, oh my gosh!

JK: Yeah. In some ways, some poems feel like an amalgamation of the voices of the women in your lineage, as if they are co-authored by your mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. I think of releasing a book as an act of mothering. So you have your blood lineage and list several black women writers in the books opening, similar to a literary lineage.  How do you see them all working to help you mother this creation?

AD: One of my ethical considerations was that if I consider myself to be an archivist, whether that's doing personal archival work concerned with my family, or larger archival work, my voice could not be the only voice present. My perspective and my lens couldn't be the only ones present. I had to implicate myself. 

When I started thinking about what this project would be, even though most of those poems didn't make the cut, I said, "Ajanaé, you have to take the study of other people seriously. You have to take the study of other people seriously, so that you can better understand yourself in the literary landscape, in the context of history, in the context of some of these conversations". I learned that it takes nothing away from you if you're not the first person to think of an idea, and that it's better to understand how or where you contribute. So I was reading black women writers and began looking for work in the archive that dealt with mother-daughter relationships.

There were a lot of texts I was compiling. There is this huge canon of Black women having this conversation, which made it a bit more intimate and sweeter. I was thrilled. I'm in a tradition of something that has been happening. In that way, I felt like I was co-laboring with those authors, and that brings me a lot of joy.

JK: To be in that space! I agree. It is just as beautiful, if not more, with your perspective. Concerning having other voices, is that an aspect that compelled you towards using some of the forms and techniques you use (footnotes, ekphrasis, erasure)?

AD: Yeah. The sonnets, specifically. I wrote a crown sonnet that failed. She wasn’t working. But the pieces of it, I think, were doing something. Also, there's something so tender about the sonnet to me. In a lot of ways, this book is a love letter, and the sonnet is associated with love. I fell in love with the idea of the sonnet as a medium to talk about my mom and to talk about these things that felt tender and intimate. 

As far as the erasures, I had this story from my mom that was in her own words. Which is a part of the ethics piece, and I felt like erasure did a few things. One, it kind of troubles the ethics of it because I'm erasing her words, which feels like a continued implication of myself. Because for all of the ethical things that I may try to compile, I think there will always be some semblance of an imperfect practice when dealing with people's real, material lives. I feel like erasure work was kind of an acknowledgment of that. I was also experimenting with visual art, period. 

The first poem in the book is “No One Teaches Us How to Be Daughters,” which was the name of my solo exhibition last year. There’s a brilliant artist named Ky Smiley, who I told all of the things I was thinking about concerning this book: girlhood, mother-daughter relationships, and the way girls and women relate to each other. Ky did a photo series called "Last Century, Last Week, Holy Will," and it was stunning. Ky sent the pictures to me. I decided, I'm going to write a poem. Because why would you take these gorgeous pictures?

JK: That's the only appropriate response.

AD: The only appropriate response. It felt like such a sacred representation of girlhood. Which is one of the things that I feel like I keep trying to get back at. The preservation of girlhood and the sacredness of black girlhood in particular. That poem was one of the last additions, for literally no other reason than it brought me joy!

JK: Going along with that, I love that you had this poem, “Girlhood Ritual #7,”  about this universal tradition you forget about as you age. As a girl, I also played in my mother's closet when she would leave. I’d put her heels on and walk around on the tile flooring. What is one of your other most memorable girlhood rituals? Also, what is one of the rituals that brings you so much comfort now that you've stepped into womanhood?

AD: Oh, there are so many things here! I will go with when you finally start bucking back and want the autonomy of what you look like. So, the girlhood ritual of leaving your house one way, and having to do your makeup, whatever it is you know you're not supposed to be doing on the bus, on the way to school, or in the bathroom once you get to school.

Mine was that my mom wouldn't let me get a weave. And so, I took a track and bobby-pinned it into a mess. Middle school, sixth grade. Track, all visible, and I bobby-pinned that bad boy into a ponytail, because I wanted a ponytail.

Even if it was just tying a shirt in the back because no one would buy you the crop top, and then having to put it all back together before you got home.

JK: Oh my gosh! That top-tier girlhood ritual. I completely forgot all about this.

AD: Yeah. That tension of your mom being like you will leave here presentable as a reflection of me versus I know what I want. I know what's fly, baby. There are adjustments I'm going to make between when I leave and when I arrive at the schoolhouse.

In terms of womanhood rituals, any reminder that I'm grown because of the new levels of intimacy that I have with the women in my life. So, the things they might share with me, or sometimes the ways they might rely on me. I'm like, you would have never. You sound like I'm your little friend! I love it for me! It's the absolute best. I love getting the tea! I love it. Call me with the gossip.

JK: It's like thirteen years ago, we would not be talking about this.

AD: Now look at us. So all of those little moments of me thinking, I can't believe they just told me that. Or I can't believe y'all included me. When I was younger, my nana, who is so fabulous, used to have these card parties. My grandmother had this beautiful home; her basement would be decked out for the card parties, and she would have it catered! I would be allowed to come down and get my plate. As soon as cards were getting ready to start, I had to go upstairs. So, the first time I learned to play bid whist with her and her friends, I was shocked because I wasn't even allowed to be on the floor where the card parties were happening. You know?

JK: Yes. It's like when you graduate from the kid table to the adult table.

AD: Yes. Those are the things that make me smile. Girl, I didn't know what was happening. It was, like, the mystery area.

JK: That makes me think of the last poem. Actually, it makes me think of two poems in Blood-Flex: “Homegoings Make Us Testifiers” and “Happy Hour With My Mother”. In “Happy Hour With My Mother,” it feels like you finally graduate to this stage in your relationship with your mom, where you can talk about deep, intimate things. And I thought that was such an excellent way to end this book. You're drinking with your mom. You're talking with her about intimacies. But then you go beyond that and share all of the abundance, too. And I was like, oh, what a way to end this. And it made me think about how this book is so candid in some ways.

In “Homegoings Make Us Testifiers,” you also talk a bit about the women in our lineages, Black women especially, having secrets and lies. This sometimes makes them liars because they had to be secretive. They had to lie. They felt like they had to resist the need to be vulnerable and human. Your book renders them human through honesty. I was curious about, one, how did you find the voice to be so candid? And, two, what did you intend with your honesty, especially because you say “dissolving the locks on your tongues” and "choosing to divorce silence"? What did that mean for you?

AD: So, multiple things. I had an issue for a very, very long time where, in my poems, the honest thing wouldn't come until, like, the last line. My editors have been the closest loves of my life. Britney, my husband, Miona, who's another incredibly good friend of mine. They’d get my poems and point to the last line and say, "The poem starts here. Rewrite it". I had to start attempting to say the honest thing first, so that, from there, there was nowhere else for me to hide in the poem. Part of that was negotiating between what I wanted for the public and what I wanted for myself. 

I was under Angel Nafis at Randolph, in my MFA program. She is a legend, a GOAT! 10 out of 10. She was reading some of my work and was like, "Alright. Babe, we’ve got to talk, because there is no space in poems for privacy. There is space for secrets, but there isn't space for privacy". If you're writing a poem and trying to shield all of these things, that leaves your reader confused. That doesn't mean you have to say all of these things. That just means maybe this poem isn’t for the public.

Omotara James, in a recent interview that Britney Rogers and I did with her for VS, said clarity is a kind of care for the reader. I didn't have the language for that before, so part of it was just not wanting a lack of clarity in my work. I intended for no one to be confused about what I was saying. 

In “Homegoings Make Us Testifiers,” I was thinking about the death of an archive. My great-grandmother was leaving the world, and we still had all these questions. Dr. Maya Angelou, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, talks about how secrecy and lies were like tools that saved the lives of our ancestors. For her mother and her grandmothers, not telling people where you're going and not telling people when you'll be back have historically been things that actually preserved the lives of Black folks. So I'm like, oh shoot, this was a method of survival! And I would like some clarity on some things. So, I was like, I don't ever want to have an archive pass on me again, and we just don't know.

JK: That resonates so deeply. I’d like to give you room if there's anything else that you wish we'd touched on.

AD: Oh, this was lovely. 

JK: Yes. This was lovely! All of your answers were sermons in and of themselves. This interview will be something to meditate on. Thank you so much for spending this extra time with me. 

AD: This was so fun. Thank you for reading my work and taking care with it. I really am grateful. I really appreciate it.

Blood-Flex. Ajanaé Dawkins, New Delta Review, 2025. 37 pages.

Volume 15.2  ✧  Summer 25

Jasmine Knowles

From Our Communal Memory: An Interview with Ajanaé Dawkins

For the release of Ajanaé Dawkins’ debut chapbook, Blood-Flex, the winner of the New Delta Review 13th annual Chapbook Competition, I was elated to have Ajanaé join me in a conversation teeming with laughter, graciousness, and talks of Black girlhood rituals, ruminations on Black mother-daughter relationships, and the revelation that memory is communal.