David Naimon
speaker
4,074 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 24 Aug
David Naimon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And I love the way – I love this and I love the way you flip the script because it reminds me of a comment Toni Morrison made in the 1980s where she said, from my perspective, there are only black people.
When I say people, that's what I mean.
And I guess I wondered if this idea of facts being white is linked to the literal gaps that appear in your book, the gaps between the front teeth of Angela Davis, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X. So these black spaces and absences that seem to be the source of their beauty in a
So talk to us a little bit about writing not just against a sharp white background, but also writing in the presence of absences or from or into a black gap.
Let's hear Frederick Douglass' Cousins because I think this poem speaks to that a little too.
Awesome.
I've been listening to Morgan Parker read from Magical Negro.
In your interview with Kava Akbar at Dive Dapper, you characterized your first book as very inward.
Your second is looking at the people around the self.
And this book is taking even a further step back, serving a larger group of people.
And you said that this distance allows you to be harsher and that perhaps you wanted this distance because of the anger you felt that you keep writing about the same themes across books and still feel like certain things aren't being picked up on, which you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, too.
That you aren't entirely being heard.
And similarly in your conversation with Candice Williams, you say that part of your fear around this new book coming out is that you put so much of yourself into it, that you hurt yourself in doing so, and that you can't stand the idea that you will have done all this emotional work.
And be read over.
So talk to us about your frustration about things that you don't feel people are hearing and what some of that might be and also what you mean by being read over.
You often see the word raw.
is a contrast to crafted.
Well, I have a question that's specific to what you're just saying that is about the line, because I do want to unpack the different ways in which you use repetition in the book, because I think it has multiple ways in which it's affecting the reader.
But one of them I wondered about is when we get these phrases repeated.
And that reappear and echo throughout the collection.
Showing 541–560 of 4,074 · page 28 of 204
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