Erica Dawson knows how to mix it up. In her award-winning poetry collection Big-Eyed Afraid, she name-checks Darryl Dawkins and Descartes, McRibs and Mephistopheles. She navigates the shoals of sex and race with guts and high style, equally at ease with densely packed metaphor and exuberant profanity.
An assistant professor of English and Writing at the University of Tampa, Erica has won praise from the likes of Mary Jo Salter and X. J. Kennedy, who called her “the most exciting younger poet I’ve read in years.” But you don’t have to have heard the kudos to know that Erica Dawson is something else; you just have to listen to her read. Not only does she grab your attention with an arresting combination of vocal chops and self-deprecating wit, she’s often the tallest (and in some Tampa circles, the blackest) human in the room.
It was after a reading she did as part of UT’s Lectores series that I asked her whether she’d ever toyed around with writing anything other than poetry — personal essays, perhaps? It seemed to me that hers was a voice CL readers would like to hear (especially since we’ve already had success with another local poet of note, one Peter Meinke).
Weeks later, over dinner at Edison in Tampa, a column was born. Or rather, the title of a column was born. “Dark & Sinful” is the name of a dessert served at Jeannie Pierola’s ever-inventive new restaurant. Besides being delicious (chocolate was involved), it struck both of us as an apt title for a column about, well, sex and race and living in Tampa when you’re often the tallest black woman in the room — and a poet who knows how to mix it up.
Read her inaugural column here — and let us know what you think.
