Wake, Butterfly: Protest (& Antidote) with Pamela Sneed
·13 min
Pamela Sneed discusses her journey from isolated childhood in Massachusetts to becoming a poet activist in New York. Influenced profoundly by Maya Angelou's Still I Rise at age 9, she credits Black women poets (Shange, Lorde, Parker, Jordan) as creative foremothers. Her narrative spans childhood where imagination and reading were survival mechanisms, to escaping at 20 with thirty dollars and no family safety net. The episode frames poetry as protest that includes antidotes; artwork as resistance to structural racism, poverty, and limitations on Black women's visibility and freedom.
