Ep. QS86: Diane Exavier with Carlos Sirah and Shayla Lawz, hosted by Angel Nafis (February 17, 2022)

The Greenlight Bookstore Podcast

For phenomenal local writer, theatermaker, and educator Diane Exavier’s début collection, The Math of Saint Felix, Greenlight’s own Poetry Salon host Angel Nafis held court with Exavier and fellow poets Carlos Sirah and Shayla Lawz for a powerful, multivocal evening of reading, reverie, and irreverence. Exavier's book-length lyric is an attempt to do the math of a woman, a family, a country, and a diaspora, plotting how the sum of one life reveals permutations of many— daughters, sisters, lovers—and the uncountable cost of a single death. Nafis, Lawz, Sirah, and Exavier held space for one another as well as the invisible multitudes living between their lines, delving into questions of “the math of survival”, of audience and witness, and the duty of the writer to witness and tend to their grief. Recorded November 29, 2021.