Interview

by Michael Quattrone

Michael Quattrone of The Westchester Review spoke with poet Phylisha “Phylli” Villanueva on the afternoon of February 2, 2025. This is an edited excerpt of their conversation. 

MQ: Hi, Phylli! Thank you for taking the time to talk to The Westchester Review about your work, and your role as Westchester County Poet Laureate. You were appointed to a three-year term just over a year ago—congratulations! You are also finishing up your MFA. How do you manage all that?

PV: I have had to come to an acceptance of part of me wanting to make sure no one would tell me no—and part of me wanting to achieve this goal to represent the county one day, so I’d have to go and get my MFA. And by my second semester, I was appointed.

I have work that people know me by—work that I’m proud of—work that is part of my survival, my story. And now that I’m in grad school, my writing is growing. And, you know, I can’t not poet. So the county is going to get works in progress. And there’s something special about that. My journey has always been about transparency and my ability to be vulnerable. It’s important. This is how it’s meant to happen, and I’ve been really enjoying it. Exploring, just playing. It’s feeling a little bit more light. 

I’ve been feeling so serious [about] my platform and my responsibility as a woman of color. What do I do with this platform and the times we’re living in? And the poets, what do we do? I’m just like, Okay, none of my work is completely done. This is where I’m at, and I’m the perfect person to be in this situation. It is very humbling, and it’s forcing me to enjoy and keep it light. 

MQ: Can you say more about the personal mission that you bring to what you just called “poeting?”

PV: Whether it was performance, or writing, or visual, I always knew art was the answer. I found the stage and writing at the same time. And when I say the stage, I mean the space. I mean the need for community to share. That’s what I mean by poeting. And I couldn’t unsee that. When I was sixteen, my Mom was like, “You cannot continue to go to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the middle of the week. You got school tomorrow, and you’re on a bus and a train, and you’re coming home after twelve! And I’m, like, “Well, I gotta find a place to do what I have to do, because I have to do this work.”

I was already volunteering at an art gallery, Blue Door Art Center, in Yonkers. Golda Solomon led a reading, and I remember sitting there saying, “My friends will never come to this. I can read here, but it’s still not the Nuyorican.”

MQ: Why wouldn’t your friends go there?

PV: It needed a little bit more … It needed to be later in the day. It needed to have a little more “all is welcome” kind of vibe. There needed to be a young representation. If you want young people to come, then the young person should kind of be hosting the thing. And I’ve always been somewhat of an old soul, so I’d find myself at these places where a lot of older folks would be at. And I myself would learn and enjoy it. And, you know, network. I knew how important it was at a young age, to make myself known.

So I spoke to Arlé Weinstein, and I said, “Hey, Arlé, if, uh, my mom made the cupcakes and provided the snacks and stuff, you think I could do a monthly teen open mic?” And it lasted for about five years. But it quickly went from teen events to community events, because parents would bring their children, and then you have parents performing. And then the space just kind of evolved. I think that’s when I really learned the power of poetry.

So I found the stage because of my interest in writing, but I think what really made me want to continue to do both—be an artist, and hold a space for artists to do what they do—is because I’ve seen how much it healed at such a young age.

A man proposed to his wife at one of my open mics. There was a[nother] man that was doing some therapy where he was advised to write. And at this point he had been writing for a number of years, and had never read anything out loud. And he chose this open mic. I called the open mic series the night I became untamed. He chose this open mic to share these things for the first time. These are, like, really intense moments. I could not unsee that.

MQ: You said that night you “became untamed.” How does that experience of being in the room, among community for that kind of sharing, influence you when you’re sitting down with a piece of paper, or at the computer, whichever way you write?

PV: Sometimes my answers are long winded. But let’s start with how I write. I like to write pen and paper. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of folks who write on devices—they will not have pen and paper at all. Growing up, being a millennial, we were in that space of … having all of these other tangible, real things that’s not in a machine. We got the best of that type of stuff. So I always thought, yes to the laptop, yes to the tablet, but that you’d always still have a notebook and a pen, or a real planner.

My mind goes faster than my hand. So I’ve noticed that sometimes when I’m really flowing, I’m just racing across the page. I’m trying to track down what’s happening in my mind. Sometimes I’ll have to do voice notes, because I’ve learned the hard way that you’ll remember something when you wake up, or in the shower or whatnot, and you’re like, “I’ll never forget this. This was such a good line!” And lo and behold, it is gone.

I find that sometimes when things are really emotional, it’s really hard to write, so I’ll have bits and pieces of things in places. I like Post-Its. I like paper that does not have lines, because I feel less called to stay in the line, and kind of just feel free. I believe that writing is a portal to the spiritual. I believe in the hand moving, and the movement of the hand being connected to the heart. I believe that it’s divinity. It is a form of divinity. It is a form of bringing in and downloading, and then presenting.

So I do think it’s very spiritual, and I do sometimes need a little bit of ritual to actually get it done. Maybe that’s a book that I keep on telling myself I’m gonna read, but skim through, or I tell myself, “This book is what I need to get through this poem.”

A lot of what I write is directly connected to different mediums. I write ekphrastically, because at the beginning of my writing career, I came in through competition, which is spoken word and slam. And then Golda picked me up and said, “You’re coming to my writing workshops, and they’re ekphrastic. And you’re going to join my jazz and poetry band.” And now I’m experiencing what it is to be a jazz poet. So, at the very beginning of my exploring being a writer, those were my lenses.

Golda typically doesn’t like open mic. She’s more of a showcase girly. She wants to know the acts, know the pieces, and curate the show. And I love that, too–I mean, who doesn’t like a really nice, curated, poetic showcase? But at the same time there is something so healing and so necessary for the culture, and for community, and unity, when you have a space that is a brave space. Where folks know to come there and share. A trust in the community [means] they will never intentionally mean to disrespect anyone, and no hate speech, but we could talk. And it doesn’t have to be perfect, or maybe not even a poem, just a quote that helps you to get through your day.

Some of the work that I do comes from when I needed to survive. Because I became a mom. Because motherhood saved my life. There was a time when I stopped writing and hosting and doing a lot of things I loved, because there was an attack on my writing. My partner at the time, my daughter’s father, would want to know what I’m writing about, would want me to share. And I’d share. But a lot of my writing in the beginning was about my identity. It was about colorism. It was about my being a Black woman, about feeling so misplaced because of my skin and my hair, and my features. And then even thinking about my country, Belize. My country seems a little misplaced. Being a West Indian country, not in the West Indies but in Central America, where I’m expected to speak and understand Spanish, and English is our language.

So that was what my writing was always about, and then I started having these feelings and concerns about what’s happening in this relationship, and I’m confused. I had never experienced something like that in my life. A lot of gaslighting. A lot of mental and emotional … There’s a lot of: Is it really me? Is this really what I think? So I’m exploring that through my writing, and I’m writing down how I’m feeling and what I’m envisioning is happening to me. So, when my partner asked me to share what I’ve been writing … And I’m writing: I’m trying to cope, trying to stay busy, I don’t know if you know “walking on eggshells,” I’m not sure how I got here, or why I’m still here is like a hypnosis …

So I start sharing what I’m writing about, and [the response was], “You’re always writing about these bad things. You make me feel bad when you write about how you’re feeling.” And, for whatever reason, instead of deciding not to share, I just don’t write. For about four years. And then my daughter’s born in August, and then it brings me all the way till maybe the following June, when, you know, a series of events happened where I’m finally like, “Okay, we gotta go.”

And on the first pull-out couch me and my daughter sleep on, I write her a letter. It was the first time I’d written something in years. And I remember wanting to write a poem, and feeling like, “Okay, we can’t write the poem. It’s just not happening. But we got to write the story, because no one is gonna tell my story. I’m gonna be the one to tell my story.”

I still write to my daughter. She’s eight. I have journals of letters I wrote to her and have never read after I wrote them—and my MFA [thesis] has gone through a couple of different ideas through the semesters, but I finally decided it’s gonna be on these letters. Letter writing, and motherhood, and my fight for my education. It hasn’t been easy wanting to go back to school, or even ending up in an MFA program. There was one point, I didn’t even think I would go back to school. I had a re-entry to the power of writing. Writing for healing, when I had to write to survive.

It started with wanting to write down my story so no one else would be able to tell my story. That way, if my daughter ever had some questions about the decisions that I had to make, and she was old enough, that I would be able to give her these journals, and should—in case anyone try to lie on me—I would be able to say, “Baby girl, I love you. And when you’re old enough, you will have all of my journals to do with whatever you want … They are yours.”

Two years after she was born, I published my first, self-published book called Pretty Girl Special. I haven’t been walking around with it, because I’m the Laureate now, and when I look at my writing in that book, it doesn’t represent me now. But it’s a beautiful collection of survival. Of healing.

Once I finalize the manuscript and press send for the author copy, which was like $3.75, I became a self-published author. In that moment, I felt instantly lighter. What an amazing feeling, to have put [together] these poems and letters to myself and my daughter. Also, notes found on my desk, because I had to constantly reinforce the message that I am okay, and that we’re growing, and we’re getting better. My cubicle at that time had so much Post-It notes that read “We’re good.” “We’re okay.”

When I learned that writing helped me heal and survive, I can’t un-know what I know. I just wanted to continue to share that with anyone who was willing to hear me.

MQ: You are reminding me of a book called The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron, which is a kind of creative workbook. Like you, Cameron is attentive to the spiritual nature of expression and creativity, and she recommends exercises to acknowledge both the folks who, intentionally or not, may have wounded our inner artists or shut us down, and the mentors who lifted us up. Do you want to say more about your teachers, or the early instinct you had to go toward language?

PV: I think my early understanding of poetry is going to come from Shakespeare and the teachers in school that made reading and performing Shakespeare so fun. There was even a Shakespeare festival in Purchase College, and my school got to be a part of that. I remember reading lines, memorizing lines, and acting, and the language sounding like music.

I was familiar with that, and it felt homey. Because my mother loves Broadway, so we would go to a lot of Broadway—so stage and theater, and memorizing, and monologues, is something that really sticks out to me in my childhood.

My father would always try to find ways to connect with us. When we were younger, my Dad loved to share quotes and proverbs. And they’re not as straightforward as he thinks. These things take a little bit of effort to understand—“birds of a feather flock together,” you know? “Show me who your friends are, I’ll show you who you are.”

As a child, you want to say, “I’m not like my friends. I hear what you’re trying to say, but …” So, you know—language, and creative, colorful analogies is the way my father spoke. I’m getting these life lessons through quotes and proverbs, because that’s all my Dad did. He’d read a whole bunch of newspapers, and he rode the train, so he’s seeing young people, teenagers’ behavior on trains when adults aren’t around, and he’s reading newspapers, and then he’s just spewing out quotes and proverbs.

So I joined a book club in middle school to stay out of the house. I don’t even really like to read, but I joined this book club, and the book we read is called Bronx Masquerade, by Nikki Grimes. And that book is the first version of Freedom Writers that I experience. And I was like, “Wow, these young people are really going through some real things,” and I really appreciated poetry as a tool to reach these young people. To help them address the things they’re going through in their life without shame, with acceptance. That was the first time I really heard youth voice in a book.

Going to ninth grade, between middle school and high school, a spoken word poet comes to the dance group I was a part of, and does a spoken word piece. And at that time I was writing a few things, and I said, “I think I can do that.”

And then when I get to ninth grade, I meet a poet friend. And her family has ties to Harlem and to the city. A lot of my family was in the city as well, but I wasn’t really going there. But when this friend of mine said, “Hey, there’s some poetry workshops. It’s called Urban Word. Let’s go to one of their classes.”

By this time we have already been watching a little Def Poetry Jam. We get there, and I meet some amazing writers. And then other writers, now famous, walking by. I’m just in this space. I didn’t know it at the time—I mean, I had a feeling—but I didn’t know at the time who was really in the room. A few years later, I’ve been traveling to Nuyorican. I’ve been befriending these other New York City youth poets. Mahogany L. Browne is hosting Nuyorican some nights, and Jive Poetic. That’ll be the first place that I meet Jive Poetic, who is now my professor.

I remember one poet I would watch on YouTube, Shanelle Gabriel. A few years go by, and Jive shares with the poetry community the Brooklyn house party. It’s like, a party in an art gallery in Brooklyn. I probably just got a car, just got a license, I just want to hang out where the poets are. I go, and we’re not doing poetry. We’re just dancing and vibing and dance competition—some of the group dances that he’ll play and get everybody to do, Cupid Shuffle or something.

And then the next thing you know, I’m dancing next to Shanelle Gabriel! I’ll never forget that: going from watching this poet on YouTube, being an advocate for lupus, and using her poetry and her music to talk about her experience, and then to see her dance and be freed up, and just be a person.

[It] was a beautiful experience, and I immediately associated Jive Poetic with spaces for community, for artists, for unity. his ability and knowing the urgency to create spaces, to continue to pave the way for writers on a mission, who understand that this is bigger than us. Similar to what I’d be doing at that same time at Blue Door. So when I decide to do my MFA program it’s because Jive is teaching. I have no idea what grad school looks like—not even looking at what the tuition is, just knowing that I can take out a loan.

I think that all of these things make me different in this Westchester poetry community … That I was willing to take on community arts development as part of my service to community, and my service to young people.

Golda Solomon I’m inspired by. I’m inspired by Sonia Sanchez. I’m inspired by E. J. Antonio—she’s from Mount Vernon. I’m inspired by the youth laureates I’ve just met recently; they are incredible. Willie Perdomo. Brenda Conner-Bey, she did ekphrastic work in Greenburgh Library. Maya Angelou. Lucille Clifton is really important to me. She has a line in her poem that says, “Come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.” I would print that poem out and tape it up, wherever I was.

And then there was a speaker, his name was Ty Sells. My last year of high school, I ended up being President and Vice President of too many different clubs—another way of keeping me out of the house. One of the clubs I would run was Students Against Destructive Decisions. I was their President for about three years, so I got to go to these conferences, like once a year. I really enjoyed listening to Ty Sells, because he didn’t really have a dramatic story. His angle was: be yourself. I loved that, because up until I had some traumatic things happen in my life, I felt very role model-ish. It was okay to be myself. And I wanted other young people to feel like that. So I said, “I want to be a public speaker like Ty Sells.”

MQ: What would you like The Westchester Review readers to know about the poem and video performance you’ve shared?

PV: The murmur form has three parts. The first part is called the sound: It’s a 38-line poem. The second part is called the murmuration, which takes all the even lines and places them in tercets. And the third part is called the echo, which is the first line of each tercet.

The murmur is an acknowledgment of Cathay Williams, who was a Black woman who pretended to be a Black man to fight in the Buffalo Soldiers 38th Infantry. This piece is going to change, and there’ll be other murmurs. But I want to continue to explore with the murmur, because I want people to continue to ask me. And then I can continue to share this information. And to honor Mahogany L. Browne’s genius in wanting to not let a piece of information die that she felt was important to share.

MQ: How has the poem changed since that performance?

PV: I come from slam. So I’m coming from the stage to the page, and there is a whole other level of thinking. When you’re on the stage and then on the page it’s a whole other level of understanding. It’s like a different type of poetry. I’m relearning poetry all over again.

[Jive Poetic] shares with me that not everything needs to be in one poem. We need time to tell the story. And there’s a lot of beauty in transitions. I wanted so badly to get to the parts, you know, to certain parts, [but] I really could lay out a little bit and leave some things for a different poem.

The name of this piece is going to change, but in this version it’s called “Sub Umbra Floreo.” That’s on the Belizean flag, and on the coat of arms, and it means, “under the shade, we flourish.”

When I started to really explore the title, and think about my experience, “Under the Shade, I Flourish” is such a strong title, a strong image in its connection to Belize, but I don’t have to talk so much about its connection to Belize. I can just talk about “under the shade I flourish.” Being a millennial, you know, “shade” is like when you’re hating on somebody.

There were a lot of people, believe it or not, that I wouldn’t expect it from, that I’ve heard say, “Who does Phylli think she is to have applied [to be the Poet Laureate of Westchester]?” My response is, I felt worthy. I felt worthy. Will Smith says it in The Pursuit of Happyness: people are always going to tell you you can’t do something, and it’s because they can’t do it—or they can’t see that far, dream that far.

So, “Under the Shade I Flourish,” I think I can go harder with that piece. It’s calling for another rewrite. I still do want to tell the story about this matriarchic family I have. I do want to tell the story about my grandaunt, who comes here around forty-five years old. She’d had a whole life in Belize, and then one day says to herself, “I’m gonna start my life over. I’m going to the Bronx.” I thought that was so empowering. She comes here, she creates this sort of portal, so that Belizeans [are] coming to explore, coming to visit, coming to move, but need to stay somewhere for a little while until they get on their feet. Everyone came through this one apartment in the Bronx.

There’s stories that need to be told there. There’s stories that need to be told about how I’d go do my hair, or I’ll do lashes, or a facial or something, and then … People like to talk to me. But then they end up saying things like, “You know those people?” And that’s kind of hard, you know, ’cause maybe I don’t look like those people. So there’s a lot of colorism there. Under the shade, I flourish.

There’s more to be discovered there [between] my old work and my new work, and wanting to do well on paper now, and then bring that back to the stage. Also having this new responsibility. This new platform. There’s expectations of me.

I don’t wanna lose the county with my bold woman Blackness. But I also don’t want to not be myself, and I was chosen for a reason. I don’t want to censor, you know? So it’s like, What is the temperature in the world? What needs to be said? There’s just so many different things I’m considering.

And so it’s showing up in my writing, and it’s a little blocked. Because I’m doing something in my head. So my professor is picking up on that. After being in grad school for these past two years, I’m looking at my work. And I have enough of the tools and things. And I’m like, “Okay. There’s more … And I’m really enjoying that part of grad school. It’s looking deeper, and preparing myself for other people to analyze my work, and [asking] how clever can I be on the page.

MQ: I want our readers to know—because it might not come across in the text—that when you say “there’s still a block there,” you’re saying that with a lot of loving enthusiasm.

PV: Yes, yes, because it’s exciting, and I am grateful for this experience to not only grow as a writer, but to also learn so much more about myself. I’m excited to explore this block. What I’ve learned in craft talks and visits to the school is that sometimes it may require some dark rooms, and some music, and some tears, and some meditation. And then how can you not connect writing to a deeper part? To do the work, it requires you to go somewhere. And that’s what I’m here to do. I’m here to do the work. If there’s anything that I would want to say to anybody, to a young person, to someone wanting to know how did I do it, my message would be, do the work. Because the work works.

MQ: It sounds like there is a generative tension between performance, collaboration, improvisation on one hand—your experience in the slam world—and writing and revising by yourself at your desk, on the other hand. Is that fair?

PV: Absolutely. You get instant gratification when you’re on that stage, and you know you had that line at home, and then you’re on the mic, and then you say the line, and everyone’s like, “Oooh!”

MQ: You hear them making the noise, which you don’t get when they’re reading your book at home.

P V: Yes, that’s one of those significant differences. I’m learning that I want to capture my voice on the page, because I won’t be there to listen to them enjoy my work, or read my work. But if I do the work, then I know that they’ll receive it, even when I’m not there.

MQ: At the beginning of our conversation, you used the word ritual. And I could feel a sense of ritual in the room when I saw you perform with the Youth Poets Laureate, and with the Blue Door Jazz Poetry Choir at the Pocantico Center. What is ritual?

P V: In my experience, ritual is a grounding place. A protected place, an intentional place. Intentionality is a process of inviting the creative spirit into the room with you.

When I envision it, a lot of it is visual for me. Whenever I enter a room, especially when I’m scared—and I’m scared a lot, but I do it afraid—when I walk into a room, I imagine that all of my ancestors are all big and tall. And they’re right behind me. And that I’m never alone, I’m always protected. And that we are in a receiving space, and a healing space … Open to receive and open to being used, and to being moved by all of the energies in the room or the space.

When I sit down to write, and I have a cup of coffee, whether I drink it or not, or a cup of tea, I decided it was going to be a hibiscus tea, because I want to drink something red. It’s just an intuition, however silly. It’s a listening. I’m probably not going to read the book, but if it’s here, it’ll channel something for me. And what do I want to listen to? I’ll put that on. Then I’ll have the notebooks, maybe. Notebooks that I’ve been writing in a few years. The journals I write to my daughter. I may not look at any of them while I’m in this writing space, but to have them there, I’m creating this energy field that feels safe enough for me to receive, to be intentional, to flow.

On the stage, ritual is listening and observing, and being very present. Because when I’m performing, it’s not just me on the stage. There’s no border between me and the audience. I believe that we are all experiencing something together, and this piece would not be this piece without my audience. The way that this piece will birth itself in this space will never happen the same way again. This is exclusive, and a privilege [for those present] because it is all of the energies that helped to create what happened. We were all here. This was ours.

PHYLISHA VILLANUEVA

Phylisha Villanueva is a spoken-word artist @phylishavillanueva, Belizean-American writer, author, educator, and advocate for community arts development, while serving as the second poet laureate of Westchester County. Born in the Bronx and raised in Yonkers, her work explores cultural storytelling themes. She currently runs The Yonkers Writing Group, plays with the Jazz and Poetry Choir Collective, and is almost done with her MFA in Poetry at Saint Francis College.

Michael Quattrone is the author of Rhinoceroses (New School Chapbook Award, 2006). His work is included in The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008) and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2013). Recent poems appear in Poet Lore, New York Quarterly, and Salamander. Michael lives in Tarrytown, New York, where he serves on the board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center.