Humans of Hopkins: Yasmine Bolden

Yasmine Bolden is an award-winning poet currently in her sophomore year at Hopkins. In an interview with The News-Letter, she described her writing process, the advocacy projects she’s been involved in and the impact she hopes to have.

The News-Letter: You’re studying Africana Studies and Writing Seminars at Hopkins. How do these different fields intersect in your life?

Yasmine Bolden: Writing is my way of processing how I see the world and how the world interacts with me as a Black person. I synthesize the information related to Africana studies or to medicine through writing. A lot of the things that I'm studying academically appear in my poetry, and the two are kind of inseparable for me.

N-L: Having created and contributed to a wide range of projects, which one has been your favorite?

YB: There's Black Youth Creates, a project that started back in 2020 when I inadvertently created a literature magazine. At the time, attention was being brought to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which is very near and dear to my heart. I was trying to merge the two and raise money for Be the Bridge Youth and the official BLM organization. 

I ended up making a special issue of the magazine that was just for young Black people to send in their art and writing. To create this platform that was reciprocal — you have people getting their work published for the first time and are also generating money that’s going towards organizations that fortify their lives — I get giddy talking about it because it was a really exciting time in my life.

N-L: In terms of your own writing, what strategies seem to work especially well? Do you rely on disciplined writing or motivation-fueled writing?

YB: I'm laughing because this is something I'm still figuring out. I’m definitely a very seasonal writer. Some people can write every single day — that is not me. I tend to be way more productive in the late spring or summer. Then I'll use the fall and the winter to submit my work to literature magazines. Oftentimes, the ideas are there in the winter too, but my motivation and discipline to actually do them is — she's out the window.

The way I discipline myself is through knowing myself. During seasons of productivity, I’ll make sure that I'm very disciplined and just churning out content; it doesn't really matter how high quality it is or if I edit it right away, just as long as I'm making new work.

N-L: Are there any themes that frequently arise in your poems? 

YB:  For so long, my writing was very focused on my racial identity. While that’s definitely still prevalent in my work, I wanted to start writing poems that are more for Black people to understand their racial identity rather than to represent it for non-Black people. 

That also means writing things that may not feel accessible to people that don't share the identities that I have because I'm also queer. Then the religious aspect on top of that, because I'm also Christian, and where I grew up, which was a predominantly white town on former plantation land. All of these things have been appearing a lot in my poetry recently.

N-L: What impact are you hoping your poetry has?

YB: First of all, I want my poetry to make people feel something when they read it, but I also want people to feel inspired to create their own things. I also hope that my poetry is goofy. I'll be honest, my early poetry was really serious. So much of the poetic world demands for Black and Brown writers to kind of spill their trauma in order to write good poetry. 

As I'm getting older, I'm realizing that, while I can talk about difficult things that I've gone through or difficult aspects of who I am, I also have permission to write whatever I want. My Instagram handle is blackpunningpoet because I love puns. That was a tradition that my grandmother and I had. So really, I want people to feel inspired to be unapologetically themselves, whether that's really serious or whether that's somehow talking about queerness and disability at the same time or writing about these wild, fantastical creatures in their minds.

N-L: As a person who reads a lot, what’s one book you’d recommend to others?

YB: I would recommend Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson. I'm not sure if this is something that August Wilson intended, but the book definitely feels like it has elements of queer time and linearity. I love some of the descriptions and then thinking about time outside of a binary and our ancestors as time travel points. 

N-L: What’s something you’re known for amongst your friends?

YB: Well, okay, two things. Number one would be burgers with fried eggs on them. I know that's very out there, but I didn't know anybody had realized how much I liked them. Then my friend said: One thing about Yasmine is she's gonna have a burger with a fried egg on it. 

And then I was talking to my friend Ruby yesterday at a poetry performance and she was like, “Everyone knows you through Blue Jays and Poets, you seem to know a lot of people through that avenue.” I started what became Blue Jays and Poets before I got here and I love it so much. It's my baby.