Kortney Morrow is the author of Run It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2026). She lives in Cleveland where she is the Program Director of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards—the nation’s only prize dedicated to honoring books that address racism and diversity. Morrow’s work has gained support from Tin House Writers Workshops and the Academy of American Poets among others.
Kathy Fagan is the author of The Unbecoming (W.W. Norton, 2026) and six previous collections. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, her book, Bad Hobby (Milkweed, 2022), won the William Carlos Williams Award from Poetry Society of America and her 2017 collection, Sycamore, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award.
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Kathy Fagan: Kortney, you reminded me today over breakfast that the last time we’d been together in person was during the pandemic, duly socially-distanced, in my backyard. I’m so glad you returned to Columbus on your book tour this week. Carmen Giménez chose your debut collection, Run It Back, as winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Reading it and hearing you talk about it at your event with our stellar mutual friend, Marcus Jackson, has definitely been the highlight of my time back in the States so far.
Kortney Morrow: It’s a full circle moment that I’m grateful for. Much has changed since that time in your garden—the loss of lives, the loss of our democracy as we knew it. Still, there’s been beauty. The Unbecoming is a sharp and subtle collection that holds that multiplicity—to witness the unmaking of a self and of a society. You hold that unbecoming with both tender care and realism. Talk to me about the impetus for this collection. At what moment did the project begin taking shape?
KF: Both our books have at their core, I think, that multiplicity, a willingness to look intensely and say hard things without hardheartedness. My previous book, Bad Hobby, is as autobiographical as it gets, focusing on the years my dementing father lived with me before he died. When the new poems arrived, it was as if my attention had been freed of my own four walls and, in a way, of my body as well. Loss and aging are responsible. I suddenly felt more permeable to a larger world: first to its contemporary horrors—Gaza, Ukraine, Congo, everyday lawlessness and hatred here in the U.S.—then to their historical analogs. Once again, the question became, as it was with the previous two books, how do I make poems out of this? Hats off, you answer that question in your very first book, Kortney.
At the center of Run It Back is a sonnet crown about the prevailing icon of your youth in Cleveland, LeBron James. In these poems you play, like LeBron, with such grace and power—interrogating the very concept of play (innocence) versus business (wealth). Addressing LeBron-the-legend, you write: “Consider the weight of a narrative.” In addition to LeBron’s success story, we have the narrative of young Kortney’s coming of age and, adjacent to that, what the true meanings of both personal and Black freedom can be, physical, economic, and cultural. The backdrop of all this, of course, is the city of Cleveland, a historic city that constantly reinvents itself. “Never running / from no one– / running towards / a new world,” you write in your brilliant ode to the part in Frederick Douglass’s hair. All of this glorious running in our books!
KM: Yes! Your opening sequence, “Listening to Others,” starts with the command to run—a verb I’m clearly partial to. It builds this forward momentum. Yet, the speaker in your poems is looking backwards on her life as she retraces the fragile disappointments of death, desire, time, misogyny, and empire. There are all of these seamless turns across the sequence until it lands with the speaker holding her father’s hearing aids long after he’s passed. “Sometimes / I bend to them and speak. Sometimes / I raise them to my own ears and listen.” Talk to me about the tension in this collection between moving forward and returning back—why was this cyclical nature important for you to lift up? Do the circle and the cycle form a type of solace?
KF: Maybe not solace so much, Kortney, as a symbol of remembrance. Like wearing a ring on your finger can be a reminder. It’s been my experience that returning to a place, say, from your past—place, book, person, work of art, whatever—can refine and redefine the original encounter. My sense of aging is exactly that. When you witness the decay of a living body, you begin to be able to imagine the decay of a dead one. And at the end of that continuum is the liminal space where new life begins. This is what bonds us as living creatures, memory and inevitable change. We’re the circle.
KM: I’m amazed by your ability to tend to the ruin of something as finite as “the end” and to infuse it with a sense of wild freedom and wonder at the same time. You tend to the morbidity of death and fulfillment with lines like: “Morticians prepare / a body for burial by draining the blood first. From carotid / to sink to sewer it flows, freed, fugitive, genius.” Or “I had thought that to be needed / was to be loved. / What, then, when nothing needed me? / And nothing did.” I reached the ends of so many of your poems and found a sense of grand release—from expectations, from others’ ideas of purpose, from wanting things to last forever. There’s a stoicism to the work. It’s almost as if this proximity to the brink brings an enlightened acceptance. Talk to me about your insistence on witnessing, on not turning away.
KF: There’s terrific liberation to be found in looking outward. I mean, I did and continue to do the self-work, and I did my solid share of caregiving, too, but to feel oneself in community with others on the planet? Well, as a lifetime introvert that feels very new and exciting to me, even as dreadful as the world often is. What’s thrilling to me is to read young poets such as yourself taking that world head-on in book one. Poem after poem in Run It Back directly or indirectly engages with historical racism, female sexuality, Americanism, Blackness, aspirational economies, the individual and belonging. Your title poem, which is also the book’s prefatory poem, opens cinematically: the I.M. Pei-designed glass pyramid that is Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the girl our speaker was, beads in her hair, the swish of a basketball as it enters the net, the sun in pieces in the triangular panes. This opening poem offers a superb model to any poet wondering how to organize their collection. Could you talk about that choice? I’d love to hear you talk about your own process of looking in the book, of witnessing the many prismatic selves your speaker is.
KM: Early on in my writing journey, I had the honor of working with the interdisciplinary artist and poet avery r. young. He explained that the first poem in a collection and the first line of every poem are the entry points into the structures you’ve built. He said something like—how do you want the reader to enter your house? You get to pick. There’s the front door, the side door, the back door, you can even have the reader climb through the window if you want. I loved the idea of the reader having to work to get inside the structure I built. Abstraction and disorientation are important aesthetic principals for me. For the longest time, “French 75” opened the collection. Towards the end of arranging the book, I decided to add “Run It Back” and “Millennium Force” to the manuscript. They now serve as the front porch to the collection. They anchor the reader in that prismatic self, and they help build that early 2000s iridescent dreamscape. Within the first two poems, the reader gets a sense of the speaker, the setting, and the thematic struggles of the book. I wrote the poem “Run It Back” staring at I.M Pei’s iconic creation and just letting the tiny turns take me in different directions. I love where it landed, “red cuts across my city / red stains on all our hands.”
In a poem written after “Ode to the Maggot” by Yusef Komunyakaa, you write “I understand the purpose of the maggot / and the metaphor of heaven. / That mercy is brief and surprising, / that change is long, and surprising.” With the release of your seventh collection on the horizon, tell me what’s one change you’ve experienced recently that has surprised you?
KF: One somewhat astonishing development is our move to Italy. I never thought such a thing possible, and it’s too long a story to tell here. The true surprise is how humbled I am by the rewards and challenges the move has brought. I’m learning like a child again, and because I understand that most of my life is behind me rather than ahead, the education is far sweeter.
KM: Italian art runs throughout this collection, from Pontormo’s Entombment and Annunciation to Michelangelo’s Pietà. Your art writing is dazzling. You bring each figure and sculpture to life as a vivid way to understand ourselves and our world with all our griefs and disappointments.
KF: Back to that notion of looking outward we discussed earlier, and how it facilitates the growth of an inner life. As I say in my book, I feel like I need visual representations to help me think beyond myself back to myself. It’s fascinating to me to see you write along visual lines as well. The prismatic effect of the sun on the Hall of Fame windows is once again in force in the arrangement of words on the page, for instance—the many verse forms you write through in the book—but also in the ekphrastic poems at the book’s end. To my mind those art works become self-portraits of our speaker, or at least ways of interrogating identity, self, and self-presentation. I’d love to hear more about your connection to visual art.
KM: Studying Italian and Italian art was actually my entry point into writing. I’ll never forget visiting Michelangelo’s David at the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze and feeling a profound sense of disbelief at the perfect figure in repose. It was unsettling. I was so mad at Michelangelo and embarrassed of my reaction at the same time. Why couldn’t I just be in awe like the Stendhal Syndrome you write of? I settled into a series of unfinished pieces called gli schiavi (the slaves) that flank the hallway leading up to the David. These are unfinished figures twisting and contorting out of stone, forever suspended in an unchiseled phase. I was comforted by the imperfection and held great reverence for the process.
KF: Oh, I know those sculptures and would so love to read anything you write about them, Kortney. Your book speaks so eloquently to the colonized body and its aspiration toward flight and freedom, but it’s also grounded in the material world as it relates to loved ones: a niece, great aunt, grandmother. I was fortunate to see in the Casa Buonarroti archive a paper with a Michelangelo sketch on one side and a to-do list in his hand on the other, “Buy Leonardo (his nephew) new shoes.” In what ways does family affect your art and professional choices?
KM: I wanted this collection to be a reclamation of my family history and a tethering to a clear Great Migration narrative, but quickly after I moved to Cleveland in this pursuit, my great aunt developed dementia. I don’t come from a big family, and it seemed everywhere I tried to get clarity on our history in Mississippi or Kentucky, some larger force wasn’t allowing for it to happen. With my great aunt, I learned to just be present and let go of the narrative I was trying to build. Her memories came out in fragments. Her mind became lucid. I retraced her steps in Harlem and held it all as much as I could. It was this untethering to a lineage and a history that shook me. At the same time, the border to Canada was closed and highly restricted. Borders and the breaking apart of families took on new meanings for me. In Run It Back, familial memories became anchors that grounded me during a time of unresolve.
KF: This “untethering” through loss that you talk about is familiar to me of course, despite our different family histories. I sometimes wonder if I was drawn to poetry as a way of recording that which would be lost. Or perhaps that which could never be truly finished and thereby explained, as a narrative suggests. Poetry accommodates fragmentary experience, and there can be a shockingly new kind of lucidity in that.
KM: In “Naturalism” you write “Michelangelo, nursed by a stonecutter’s / wife, worked stone a little every day / until his death at 88, the figure emerging / rough comfort, neither dead nor alive, / left as unfinished as the rest of us.”
Kathy, I cannot thank you enough for honoring and attending to the unfinished elements of our lives. Thank you for holding up the figure emerging in the “non-finito” state, indefinitely. Like a masterful sculptor, this page is your stone, your words are your chisel. The Unbecoming is a timeless collection brimming with stoic wisdom. May we each turn to it for solace as we continue to go forth and make.
KF: Kortney, you already know how much light and love I wish you on your way forward. Thanks again for this heartening conversation.
