Inspired by his students, Sami Miranda became a poet who honors his raíces
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In his visual art and poetry, D.C. artist, writer and teacher Samuel ‘Sami’ Miranda shows off his Puerto Rican raíces (roots) and childhood in the South Bronx. His work has even been included in the new Smithsonian Latino Gallery exhibition, ¡Presente!.
A passionate artist, Miranda uses art to talk about colonialism, conquest and capitalist rule. He works with local art programs to post and share his drawings. On Fridays around 4:15 p.m., he can be found at the American Poetry Museum in D.C.’s Brookland neighborhood, where he is both chairperson of its Board of Directors and its curator. The museum is near the Brookland-CUA metro stop on the red line and the Brookland Arts Walk, where it frequently holds group poetry readings and writing sessions. Miranda says the idea was to create a space “where people can have a conversation about art.”
Miranda returns to Hola Cultura to discuss his new book, “Protection from Erasure,” a collection of poems released in January by the San Diego-based Jaded Ibis Press. “[W]e’re reminded that mundane events and minute moments in our everyday lives can and should be memorialized,” says Jaded Ibis about the collection.
During a Zoom call, Miranda also shares some of his personal experiences, including how he came to write his book, what it’s like to come from the Bronx and the differences between what the arts were like when he was a child and D.C.’s arts scene when he started his career a few decades ago. Miranda has taught at Bell Multicultural High School in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood and currently works at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School. His soothing storytelling techniques come our way as he talks passionately about striving to influence his students through the arts, poetry and by treating them like poets.
Read more of what he had to say below.
What was your journey into poetry? How did you become a poet? When did you write your first poem? And what inspired you to become a poet?
My first poem was crappy. [It was] for my high school yearbook and I can’t stand looking at it. But my journey into poetry didn’t start there. This is my 30th year teaching. I was teaching elementary for my first four years, and then I jumped up to high school. I started teaching ninth graders. I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I was like, ‘Okay, let me try to teach them something that I like.’
I like to read poetry, so I decided to teach them poetry and literature. I wanted to focus on Latino writers and Black writers, but it turns out that they wanted to know what I was writing. I was like, ‘No, this is about you all. This is about you all writing, you all developing your voices.’ They were like, ‘No. If you aren’t writing, we aren’t writing.’ So I said, ‘Okay. We’ll write together.’ That’s where the journey started.
That led to me reading at my first open mic and reading on stage for the first time with my students. As they were writing, I would tell them, ‘You guys need to share your stuff. I want you to let your voices be heard somewhere else, not just here in the classroom.’ We all went to an open mic on U Street. There were like 20 of us. We go in, we all sit down, and this woman, Toni Asante Lightfoot, is the host. She tells us, ‘Oh, great, you all are gonna read.’ All the kids looked at me. So I said, ‘If I read, y’all have to read.’ We all signed up and read poems that night.
When the kids got off the stage, all the poets who were in the audience and had been going there regularly came over to the table. They were talking to them not as kids but as poets – they were having conversations with these 14 and 15 year olds about their writings, right there in the open mic. Not only was I inspired to write, but I was inspired to be part of this writers’ community that saw young people as writers in and of themselves. That was where it started. That was 1996.
Do you think that taking the time to observe others has made you the artist you are today?
I write poems, but they’re usually stories in some way. I write about people. Starting in college, I would go home to my grandfather and ask him to tell me about when he was a kid, when he was in the war or when he first came to New York. He would look at me and say, ‘¿Para qué? No importa.‘ [For what? It doesn’t matter.]
When he died, they started emptying out his closets. This man had all these pictures from World War II. He had the letters my grandmother wrote to him while he was stationed in Panama, [where she would say things like,] ‘I can’t wait to be in New York City to marry you.’ He had all these things, including the certificate that he had to get in New York in the early ’60s to let him vote. New York City put into place this thing where you actually have to go take a test to prove that you were literate in order to vote in New York City. This was not Mississippi. This was not the South. This was New York. He still had this certificate and he voted religiously every year. When I think about it, all my poems are conversations. They’re conversations with my grandfather that I never physically had with him.
If you still have your people around who are older and have history, sit down with them, record them, capture their stories. Eventually, they are not gonna be around and you will have to make those stories up based on the pictures and the letters they left behind. Observation is everything because I’m also a visual artist. I take a lot of these photos, and I turn them into poems as well.
What has been the most challenging part about being an artist?
Finding the next body of work. I work in chunks. I did a whole thing on my grandfather. I did a whole bunch of poems on migration, immigration, paintings, embroidery and all these other things. But the next step is [deciding] what you’re looking for. I’m working all the time, but is this what I really want to be working on? Do I need to work on something else? Do I need to continue doing that? It’s difficult. I want to be producing all the time, but I also have a full-time job. I also have a family. I manage an arts nonprofit (the American Poetry Museum) in Brookland. I’m a poet and a visual artist. I’m part of a film about the Mount Pleasant uprisings (the Mount Pleasant Riots that took place in May 1991). You’ve got to figure out how to produce work you really want, while still trying to meet your responsibilities everywhere else.
How does it feel to be a part of the Smithsonian Institution’s new Molina Family Latino Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, ¡Presente!?
It felt good. Until I actually saw it in the museum, I just thought, ‘Oh, I got a piece. It might be there.’ It feels good to know that representation is occurring in a way that includes D.C. because oftentimes, the national art scene forgets the local.
If you look at the exhibit, they have a number of D.C. references. They talk about this woman, Casilda Luna, who’s an Afro-Dominican who came to D.C. in the ’50s. She came in an era where segregation was pretty heavy. This lady took no [disrespect] from anybody. She did a lot of work in the community around housing. It was super cool to see because they often make us disappear. Especially the Afro-Latino presence, they disappear it even more. So it felt good.
I’m there at the American Poetry Museum every Friday evening and every Saturday. We have poetry readings. Folks come in, sit down and do a collage or read a poem. Or they write or share a poem. We’ve created this space where people can have a conversation about art.
How do you think growing up in the Bronx has affected the way you saw and felt about poetry?
Hip hop [played a part]. I grew up in the Bronx from the ’70s to the early ’90s. I always tell folks you don’t understand what you lived through until you see it on TV. I grew up in a Bronx that had been burnt down. There were places where I could walk and see whole blocks without any buildings — a whole block just torn down, with one building left standing. I used to take the train to go to high school, and I would see the elevated train from a distance. I would race the train. If I ran fast enough, I could beat the train to the train station. I think the visual harshness and the beauty of a place [spark something] in people, but so does fear. I got robbed in a classroom. These kinds of things affect how you see the world.
Growing up in the Bronx was this beautiful independence where you had all these things happening. I would jump on the subway and ride, or I would walk for miles. I was a very solitary person when I was a kid. I cut a lot of classes and just walked. I think that’s what made me an observer. Growing up in the city at that time, you protected yourself in a couple of ways. You figured out how to throw down, or you disappeared. I chose to disappear.
How did this book come about? And what was the inspiration for these particular poems?
When I started looking through my work, I found this thread that was about maintaining the stories of other folks that were still alive. I think that also comes from watching my grandfather go through dementia, where little bits of his memory just kept falling away.
In Mayan culture, they say that you die three times. The first time is when your breath leaves your body, the second time is when your body becomes dirt, but your final death is when nobody remembers you. What I’m hoping to do with my work is to keep folks alive for as long as possible, to keep ideas alive as long as possible and to keep conversations alive for as long as possible.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. Want to learn more about Miranda? Tune in later this year for Hola Cultura’s new podcast, “Artistas in the Capital,” which will feature an expanded version of our conversation with the poet.
– Interview and Story by Evelyn Margarito-Casas, Kailah Floyd, Joycelin Salmeron
and Ramona Santana of SPEL’s Afro-Latino Team
– Story Edited by Michelle Benitez on SPEL’s Editing Team
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