Imani Tolliver's Debut Memoir Captures 'Me Too' Moments in Verse

Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn spends time with Imani Tolliver, author of debut memoir RUNAWAY: A Memoir in Verse, at Los Angeles Review of Books. Littlejohn foregrounds their conversation with a description of Tolliver's recent reading at The World Stage, where she shared light and heavy material from her new book before "a heavy exhale from the collective breath held tight throughout the packed house." Let's pick up there: 

Earlier, over breakfast in Larchmont, Tolliver, discussing the poem, confesses: “I almost never read it at a reading. And sometimes before I get in front of a microphone or a podium there’s a poem that’s calling out to me that tells me it wants me to read it, and I’m like, I don’t want to read it! But so often I find it’s what I’m supposed to do. The poems I’m afraid to read, I must read; the poems I’m afraid to write, I must write, because there’s someone in the audience that may not say anything to me, but I see them looking at me, and I see them sharing, ‘Me, too. Me, too.’”

There were plenty “me, too” moments that night for the award-winning Cave Canem fellow who honed her voice in call-and-response settings like the Stage. RUNAWAY traces her artistic journey, from Degnan Boulevard and the corridors of Los Angeles through her family’s bookshop and the beaches where she rested when she fled her parents’ home. The book is full of sense memories, of loss and victory, of black hair and coming-out, of the artists and places and spaces that make Tolliver who she is.

Reading RUNAWAY is good therapy: heart opened, assumptions challenged, mind blown. You feel a little braver and more connected to your own truth — at least that’s what it did for me. And speaking with her was no different. Here is an excerpt of our two-hour conversation.

Read their discussion at LARB.