Stay Brave, with Leah Umansky

The brilliant Leah Umansky asked me some smart and challenging questions in her Stay Brave series. I’ll paste an excerpt from one of my answers below. Thank you, Leah!

And here’s a pic of a brave little bush flowering against the odds of a cold spring a few years back.

“It feels that the most important thing we’ll be doing, trying to stay brave, is to survive – and especially, urgently, to help others do so. Many of our kin are at grave risk: those who are trans, undocumented, LGBTQ, young, BIPOC, disabled. Those of us with more privilege – I say this as a white, middle-class, straightish woman – will need to use that privilege to be in solidarity, side-by-side, with our at-risk kin.”

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Author: Sarah Browning

Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007). She is co-founder and for 10 years was Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poems of Provocation & Witness. She is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and recipient of the Lillian E. Smith Writer-in-Service Award as well as of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, Mesa Refuge, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and three issues of POETRY magazine. From 2006 to 2019 Browning co-hosted the Sunday Kind of Love poetry series at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC. She has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize. She received an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Rutgers University Camden in 2021 and lives in Philadelphia, PA.

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