Let’s Talk! Conversations That Matter
featuring Maya Williams, MSW, MFA
Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine
Occurred on Tuesday, June 13, 2023
We welcomed you to join Rev. Dr. Allen Ewing-Merrill, Executive Director of The BTS Center, for a lunchtime “Let’s Talk!” conversation with Maya Williams, Portland, Maine’s Seventh Poet Laureate.
Maya has recently published their debut poetry collection, Judas & Suicide, which navigates religion and suicidality. It approaches these topics through the lens of Black family and community, sadness, medication, sexual violence, the prison industrial complex, media, and Bible verses.
Maya notes that suicide is often framed as betrayal, even though we live in a world that betrays us. They ask, “When this world tells us that death is better, what does it mean to have faith in life?”
View the conversation, recorded on June 13, 2023:
Praise for Judas & Suicide:
“Rarely, if ever, have I read such an honest and artistic exploration of what it means to have to develop a will to live. Williams writes about suicide and suicidal ideation with a vulnerability and complexity that is only possible through lived experience. This book is one small, but crucial, step toward destigmatizing suicide in society and one large leap in helping those who have had their lives touched by it feel less alone.” — Allison Raskin, Author of Overthinking About You: Navigating Romantic Relationships When You Have Anxiety, OCD, and/or Depression
“How about we try living? Maya Williams writes in the persona of Paul the Apostle, and this book shows me how to try to live — this book is that good good prayer, it is a gust of wind that lifts my feet from beneath me. Across the poetry collection, Williams uses certain poetic forms (for example: the ghazal, the villanelle, and the sestina) to express the entrapment of trauma, the cycle of depression, and the tension within the speaker to break out of its forms. Williams is impeccable at curating fragmented images and voices to create a landscape in which the speaker navigates the living, the past, and the despair found in religion. Like summer rains being the occasional cleanse we desire with its liveliness within the gray, this book is the summer rain that reminds me that I am alive, that I am here to stay, and that I am grateful that Maya Williams, and their poems, are here to stay as well.” — Joshua Nguyen, Author of Come Clean
“There are four poems titled ‘If You Stop Crying, It Won’t Hurt As Much’ in Maya Williams’ poetry collection Judas & Suicide. In titles such as this, the reader is brought into the tension that is at the heart of so much of this extraordinary collection of poetry: the tension between a title and a line; the tension between wanting help but rejecting unhelpful help; the tension between not wanting to die and wanting to live. In dexterous form, through multiple voices, registers and allusions, Maya Williams asserts a vibrant poetry that has, at its core, understood itself, and asks to be understood.” — Pádraig Ó Tuama, Host of Poetry Unbound with On Being Studios and Author of In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World and Feed the Beast
Check out this recent interview, published in the May 24, 2023 issue of Portland Phoenix: “Beyond Doubt: Maya Williams’ Debut Poetry Collection is a Force to Be Reckoned With”
Meet our Guest:
Maya Williams, MSW, MFA
Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently the seventh poet laureate of Portland, Maine. Eir debut collection, Judas & Suicide, is out now via Game Over Books. They were one of three artists of color selected to represent Maine in The Kennedy Center’s Arts Across America series in 2020 and were listed as one of The Advocate’s Champions of Pride in 2022.
