When Tina Chang was working on her latest poetry collection, Hybrida, she focused on news stories about the violent deaths of unarmed black men like Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice. As the mother of a young black boy, she felt compelled to ask through her work how she would raise her son to be safe. Chang, Brooklyn’s first female poet laureate and a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, spoke about the creative process during a taping of the First Draft podcast hosted by Mitzi Rapkin. The discussion took place before a live audience in June at Aspen Words’ Summer Words Writers Conference and Literary Festival, where Chang taught a five-day poetry workshop. “I was trying to chart the course of how difficult it is to get to motherhood,” Chang said of Hybrida, “and yet how miraculous that is.” She explained that she wove her own history into the book, too. Poems like “Revolutionary Kiss” highlight the ancestral paths from Taiwan and Haiti to the United States, paths that brought Chang to the moment when she kissed her son for the first time. Chang also spoke of her admiration for Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stanley Kunitz, her 25-year friendship with former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, and her favorite karaoke song, “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Mother of Invention
Publications Section 4: Strengthening Practices to Improve Job Quality
Tools: Employee Ownership
View tools and resources related to employee ownership.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Centering Workers in Workforce Development
The Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance collaborates with employers and stakeholders to boost employment, earnings, and equity for local workers.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Lessons and Leadership To Foster Economic Justice for Illinois Workers
LEP trains workers to promote equity, enforce rights, build unions, develop leaders, ensure workplace safety, and advance economic justice.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Worker Owned and Worker Driven
While the rideshare apps have increased convenience, they’ve eroded job quality. See how the Drivers’ Cooperative is helping to end exploitative conditions.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Creating Employee-Owned Businesses That Provide Good Jobs and Succeed
Through employee ownership, The Industrial Commons is building a new Southern working class that erases the inequities of generational poverty.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Strengthening the Hidden Resilience Workforce
We see the effects of climate change, but we rarely see the people who help to rebuild — and they often lack safe conditions, decent pay, or benefits.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Advancing a Pro-Worker, Pro-Climate Agenda in Texas
The Texas Climate Jobs Project advances a pro-worker, pro-climate agenda — helping to solve the climate crisis while creating millions of good jobs.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Organizing and Coalition Building for Structural Change
LAANE, led by Job Quality Fellow Roxana Tynan, is fighting to build an economy rooted in good jobs, thriving communities, and a healthy environment.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Organizing Unemployed and Underemployed Workers
UWU, led by Job Quality Fellow Neidi Dominguez, engages unemployed/underemployed workers, a population that has not been mobilized at scale since the 1930s.
Longform
How Local Journalism Can Bring Communities Together
MIT Center for Constructive Communication Director Deb Roy explains how the caricatures Republicans and Democrats paint of each other diverge from reality, and the ways local newsrooms can leverage their “trust capital” and emerging technology to promote listening and understanding amid disagreement.