Peter Orner at The Rumpus interviewed me recently, and you can read it at their website. Here’s the first paragraph:

I’m not one of those people who recounts the plots of movies or TV shows or the latest New Yorker cartoon I thought really hit it. So forgive me while I contradict myself. But a few years ago there was this New Yorker cartoon that struck a chord and has stuck with me to this day. In the drawing is a guy standing in front of his house, surrounded by men with machine guns. The caption says something like, Closing in on the Last Humanist in America—or something to this effect. Chris Abani could be this guy: a genuine, authentic, howling humanist on the American landscape, calling out to us to acknowledge and share our common joy and our common pain. Only if we accept, Abani seems to say, what we all must endure—whoever we are—can we make any progress at all toward the alleviation of suffering. Out of hundreds of examples I could turn to in Abani’s work, here is one from his book length poem Sanctificum:

Read the rest at The Rumpus