The Unbound Book Festival is happening in Columbia this weekend and KBIA has been speaking with some of this year’s featured authors.
Taylor Byas, a poet with roots in the Southside of Chicago, recently debuted her first full-length poetry collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, an award-winning tale about a Black woman’s journey into adulthood that pulls her away from her childhood home.
Byas recently sat down with KBIA’s Sireen Abayazid.
Sireen Abayazid: So, who did you, I guess, write this book for?
Taylor Byas: First and foremost, – my fellow South Side Chicagoans, but, you know, even outside of Chicago, I think this book is definitely for Black people, but Black youth in particular.
"Even in the process of kind of like putting the book together, you're kind of like figuring out what the book is about."Taylor Byas
I think a lot about, you know, my own experiences going through the education system, you know, high school, even undergrad, and all of those sorts of things – just how little I read of people who not only, you know, looked like me and had experience like me, but also like writers who were still living and were writing about, like, experiences today.
This book is for, you know, Black youth, youth of color who need to see their worlds and their lives and their experiences reflected back to them.
And, hopefully, get some sort of permission to honor their own stories and to see the importance in their experiences.
Sireen Abayazid: When did you start writing poetry?
Taylor Byas: I wrote very terrible Tumblr poetry when I was in high school.
Fiction was kind of like my main love at that point, and I went into undergrad as a fiction writer and at the end of undergrad, I actually took an acrostic poetry class that just sort of completely changed my life.
And sort of encouraged me to switch over to poetry, and then, sort of like, take poetry more serious, and it became my first genre.
Sireen Abayazid: A lot of the poems are associated with some pretty tough memories. Did you deal with any roadblocks when you were writing?
Taylor Byas: I think the poems about my dad in particular were some of the harder ones.
I feel like I was kind of overwhelmed with everything that I wanted to say, and I didn't really have a sort of structure or container to kind of work through all of that within.
The content of it felt so heavy, and so, I had to kind of find this form that was like – kind of fun and kind of whimsical – to help balance out, you know, the heaviness that I was bringing to the page and again, to kind of propel me forward.
Sireen Abayazid: Do you have any favorite poems from the book?
Taylor Byas: So, 'Dear Moon,’ the very last poem of the book, which is also the last poem that I wrote for the book. It's my favorite poem because I think it was an epiphany poem.
Even as I was, you know, writing the poems and even in the process of kind of like putting the book together, you're kind of like figuring out what the book is about.
As I was doing that, I think it hit me as I was putting it together. I'm like, "Yeah, this is, you know, a love letter to Chicago. This book is about home and it's about family."
And then I was like, "Oh, this is also a whole book about learning to love the self and relearning what love looks like and the possibilities of it and what it can be.
And 'Dear Moon' was just kind of that epiphany kind of coming out
See more Unbound Conversations here and see more including the complete schedule of events on the Unbound Book Festival website.
