Telling Stories to Anybody Who Will Listen

As a field, we discuss composition histories from inside the academy, both metaphorically and materially; the subject of the conversation is most often college students and we most often have these conversations at conferences or at our institutions. Driven by my own writing experiences, I have been thinking lately about the relationship between love—for self and others—and composition practice, and given the many parallels between the oppressions and resistance strategies employed by Black people in our nation’s early years and those of the current moment, I think about the evidence of the radicaly liberatory function writing served for enslaved Africans that can be found in in Black American’s current practices. Robert Colón, the center of the present work, is unmistakably a writer. This interview serves to provide some insight into contemporary Black composition practices offers new perspective on my position in the field of composition.