Rosemarie Ho Interviews Eve L. Ewing at The Nation

Prefacing their interview for The Nation, Rosemarie Ho describes Eve L. Ewing as a "Chicagoan first and foremost. The rest of her titles—sociologist, professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, poet, occasional playwright, Marvel Comics writer, beloved Twitter celebrity—are all in the service of her deep love for the city and its people." More: 

After coming across a report called The Negro in Chicago, written in 1922 by the citizen-chaired Commission on Race Relations, while during research for her first nonfiction book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, she decided she had to do something with the study, which looks into the causes of the relatively unknown race riots that roiled the city a hundred years ago. The result is 1919, a poetry collection spanning the decades before and after a black boy named Eugene Williams was killed, starting the unrest.

Ewing experiments with poetic form in 1919 as she educates the reader on the horrific history of racial violence in Chicago. (One of my favorite poems in the book, “Coming From the Stock Yards,” happens to be an abecedarian, a kind of poem in which the start of every line follows the previous one alphabetically.) What struck me most when I spoke with her is how willing she is to bring you into her world and how invested she is in the idea of writing as a means of extending community. In other words, she is, above all, a rare thing: a great pedagogue.

Read their conversation at The Nation.