Interview 026 with Janelle Poe
Listen to New Yorker and African American Janelle Poe, MFA, from Harlem who also identifies as Black, because she sees Black as a “diasporic, global, racial, cultural category.” Her parents are from New York. Her grandparents are from Alabama and Mississippi. Her grandfather was a sharecropper who dropped out of school in the sixth grade in Mississippi in order to help feed his family. Janelle is a first-generation-PhD candidate. She is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at City College of New York. We met in the MFA program at City College when we were both pursuing our Master of Fine Arts degrees. She was teaching undergraduate students online and attending doctoral classes online during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. In 2022 Janelle laments the requirement for proof-of-vaccine to enter certain spaces in New York City. She questions why a negative-Covid-19 test isn’t enough to enter certain places for those who are unvaccinated. She questions the logic of the U.S. government requiring citizens to get the Covid-19 vaccine. She questions why the CDC reduced the mandatory quarantining days from 10 to five after a positive Covid-19 test. She questions the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccine: why are people still catching Covid-19 after getting the vaccine and the booster shot? Sadly, her best-friend’s second cousin caught Covid-19 and passed away within 2 days after entering the hospital.
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