Truth Thomas
Opening to part 1 of Truth
Welcome to season 4 of Creativists in Dialogue and our inaugural “Creativity and Difference” conversation with artist and educator Truth Thomas. In part one, our guest host Naomi Ayala and I discuss with Truth his early years growing up in Knoxville and DC, as well as his years as a professional musician. Part one culminates with Truth discussing his experiences in London. There, he encounters a cultural landscape with different perspectives, and these perspectives altered his understanding of himself and the world.
In part two, we continue our conversation with Truth Thomas as he begins nurturing his life as an artist, educator, and writer. As the Poet Laureate of Howard County, Maryland, Truth talks about the challenges of that ambassadorial role where he now has to speak to all the people in his divisive times.
Elizabeth: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Creativity and Difference series of Creativists in Dialogue, a podcast embracing the creative life. In this, our fourth season, we’re adding a new component: guest co-hosts. Michael Oliver, as you will doubtless gather whenever he laughs, is serving as our audio engineer today when our guest co-host is the one and only Naomi Ayala, lifelong poet, educator. I’m Elizabeth Bruce.
Naomi: And I’m Naomi Ayala.
Elizabeth: And we are delighted today to interview Truth Thomas. Truth Thomas, born Glenn Edward Thomas in Knoxville, Tennessee, is an American singer songwriter, poet, editor, publisher, and founder of Cherry Castle Publishing, LLC.
He’s the author of Party of Black (2006), A Day of Presence (2008) [00:01:00] Bottle of Life (2010), Speak Water (2012) and winner of the 2013 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, and My TV is Not the Boss of Me (2013). He was the Jesse Redman Foster Book Award finalist in 2014, a children’s book illustrated by Corey Thomas. Thomas is the creator of the fixed form of poetry known as the “skinny.”
In addition, he’s edited and co-edited a number of anthologies, including Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience, published by Cherry Castle Publishing in 2022, The Skinny Poetry Anthology, published Cherry Castle Publishing 2019, and is the editor in chief of The Skinny Poetry Journal.
During his early music career, recording as Glenn Edward [00:02:00] Thomas, his first full length studio album, “Take Love,” was produced in 1982 on Capitol Records by Soul Train television show creator and host Don Cornelius. In 1992, Thomas officially changed his name from Glenn Edward Thomas to Truth Thomas.
He is a former writer in residence for the Howard County Poetry and Literary Society, AKA HoCoPoLitSo, and the inaugural poet laureate of Howard County, Maryland. His poems have appeared in over 150 publications, including The 100 Best African American Poems edited by Nikki Giovanni. And This Is the Honey edited by Kwame Alexander. He’s also the current poet laureate of Maryland.
Truth: Current poet laureate of Howard County, Maryland.
Elizabeth: Okay. Got that. Welcome, Truth.
Truth: Thank you very much for having me. It’s a blessing to be here. I know you [00:03:00] all who are listening cannot see what’s going on here, but this place is marvelous. This little studio with all these smiling faces and gifted and brilliant folks. So yes, again, I’m very honored to be here.
Elizabeth: We are thrilled to have you.
Truth: By the way, it was the Jessie Redmon Fauset Award, and it’s HoCoPoLitSo, which can be a little tricky to say.
Elizabeth: HoCoPoLitSo.
Truth: HoCoPoLitSo, yes.
Elizabeth: Okay, I’ll work on that.
Truth: This is not a test.
Elizabeth: Truth, let’s talk a little about your personal history. You are originally from Knoxville, Tennessee. I have a brother and some old friends in Knoxville, and I’ve visited it a few times. I really don’t know it at all but I think of Knoxville and I think of Tennessee as being in the American South, though not the Deep South. It has its own unique culture and I’m thinking that the late, great Nikki Giovanni is also from Knoxville. I know we used to have a children’s book that she wrote about growing up there and I’m thinking maybe the two of [00:04:00] you know each other, or knew each other.
Truth: No. Let me say, first of all, Knoxville is plenty Deep South enough.
Elizabeth: Okay.
Truth: Let’s be very clear about that. And Nikki Giovanni, bless her soul, was and will remain a giant in poetry. I did not have the great pleasure meeting her directly, but when I was a little boy, once my mother had moved us from Knoxville to DC, she hitched a U-Haul trailer to the back of a 1965 Mustang that was blue with a white canvas top and wide wheels. And she got us the hell out—I don’t know if you can say hell on the podcast.
Elizabeth: Oh, sure you can.
Truth: So I’ll say it again. She got us the hell out of Knoxville and moved us to what is now called the DMV. And when I was about nine or ten years old, she took me to see Nikki Giovanni when she was reading [00:05:00] somewhere near GW, I believe it was. And I was instantly in love because she was gorgeous. And because of the poetry. When I got home, I wrote her my finest nine-year-old letter of adoration. And my mother mailed it to Nikki, and she wrote me back. And what she said was, and I’m paraphrasing this, that she wanted me to grow up to be a good man. And I’m trying to be. That’s the closest—other than the picture that I had of her in my bedroom when I was growing up with the afro, looking fierce, that I came to know her directly.
Elizabeth: Wow. In terms of growing up in Knoxville, before moving, as you say, to metropolitan Washington and going to high school here at Howard University were there other aspects of Knoxville that you want to talk about in terms of how it affected you as a young child?
Truth: Certainly, I have Southern roots. [00:06:00] Knoxville is very much a part of my history. And I love that. But not everything about Knoxville, and my Southern experience, was lovable. One of my earliest remembrances is of my mother taking me to McDonald’s, Mickey D’s. In the years just after desegregation, my mother and my grandmother raised me. My father was a picture frame, so women reared me. And my mother wanted me to learn what it was like to be assertive. So we stopped off at the McDonald’s and she told me to go in and order some food. So I went into this McDonald’s on Kingston Pike, I believe it was, and I stood in front of the counter while all of these White McDonald’s workers in the uniforms they had back then that were very formal in terms of what we think of fast food workers wearing now for uniforms. And they went [00:07:00] about their tasks of getting food ready for everybody else in the restaurant but me. I stood there for a long time until my mother, who does not play, came in to McDonald’s, wanted to know what was wrong, and tore them up verbally. I remember going home, and I was upset because I didn’t understand why I had been treated that way. Because up until that point, I thought I was just like everybody I saw on television. A human being. In those years, mid ‘60s, everybody on television was White, but I thought everybody I saw on television equated to me in terms of my humanity. My mother had to explain to me that the reason that I was treated that way was because I was Black. That was my first awareness.
Naomi: And how old were you?
Truth: I must have been seven or eight.
Elizabeth: Wow.
Truth: Something like that. That’s not a unique experience, too. Many black and brown folks in this country, but mine was in Tennessee. That memory is one of my [00:08:00] earliest there. I had some wonderful memories, too. But it’s not a place that I look back on entirely with fondness because of things like that.
Elizabeth: Speaking of your early years, you’ve also talked about being raised in the Baptist Church.
Truth: Yes.
Elizabeth: And I’m wondering if you could elaborate on how that influenced your creative imagination?
Truth: When my mother brought us to DC, it was just DC then. There was no concept of a DMV. We lived on Eastern Avenue Northeast. Near New Hampshire Avenue. I went to school in Maryland, but I went to church and I went to the movies in DC. That was my cultural education. And the first poetry I ever heard was from preachers who moved me, were able to motivate me to do something other than color in the pews while everybody else was having church. I actually started to listen to what they were saying and that impressed me. It impressed me then, and [00:09:00] it moves me now.
I went to Rock Creek Baptist Church, which is on, used to be on 8th and Upshur Street. It’s now a long condominium like much of Petworth is. Not condominiums, but different kinds of housing, with different kinds of colors of folks who now live there. In that neighborhood where I went to church, it was all Black in those days and there was a cultural vibrance to that area because that’s just off of Georgia Avenue. The long and short story of that experience is, that was all church for me, culturally. Rock Creek Baptist Church, Georgia Avenue.
And my mother was searching, so she went to a whole bunch of different churches. We went to some Methodist churches, some Seventh Day Adventist churches, which were very cool, but the whole Saturday thing didn’t work well for her schedule, I believe it was, or perhaps something else about it wasn’t the right fit. [00:10:00] But the lyrics and the lyrical manner of the preacher’s presentation struck me, and has always been a part of my aesthetic.
Naomi: Along those lines, Truth—
Truth: Hey, Naomi.
Naomi: Hey, Truth. It’s good to see you.
Truth: Good to see you, too. Abrazos.
Naomi: Gracias. I wanted to talk a little bit about your creative influences—and listening to you talk about your mom, I would be curious to ask if she was one of those—but the intellectual, creative, musical, and otherwise influences, and first talk about that. I have a compound question, but I’ll ask that first.
Truth: My mother, you may not know this, is fluent in Spanish.
Naomi: ¿Sí?
Truth: Sí. I’m such a slacker. She taught Spanish and French. She was a school teacher. When I was a little boy, maybe about six or [00:11:00] seven, maybe younger than that, she would sit me down at a table in the kitchen and make me write. She forced me to write. Every day. And I didn’t want to do it. Because I wanted to play. But as I mentioned before, my mother didn’t play. So I wrote, so I’d write things like, “I don’t want to be at this table writing, I do not want to, I want to be out playing.” I would fill up the page, she’d say, “Good, I’ll see you tomorrow.” After a while, I started to love it in there. She taught me to love literature. She speaks Spanish fluently. She taught me to love people, and that stays with me. Whatever good that I’ve done, I did not do without her nurturing, and that of my grandmother, too.
Naomi: Thank you.
Truth: You’re welcome.
Naomi: So you’re a poet, musician, photographer, publisher, teacher, can you talk about how all of these different disciplines [00:12:00] feed one another within you and maybe how you wrestle or they wrestle with you for your attention?
Truth: They don’t wrestle, for the most part, because they’re all gifts from God. God doesn’t wrestle against God. They’re all stories, all different ways of telling stories. And I’ve been blessed to have certain abilities to do that since I was very young. I always knew I could play before I played. I was writing, envisioning what I would say when I was older, when I was very young. And most recently, with my journey into photography, it’s much the same way. I was moved by photographers that I was around, Melanie Henderson was a very big influence, as a matter of fact.
Naomi: Very talented DC poet.
Truth: She’s gifted. Gifted poet.
Naomi: Yeah. Cool human.
Truth: Cool human. And photographer. She helped me get my first camera and taught me how to plug it in, where the lens was supposed to go. [00:13:00] And I realized quickly that it was a beautiful experience because it forced me to slow down and see a way of telling stories that I hadn’t thought about before.
Time sometimes is an issue, but I’m very disciplined. I’m up about five o’clock every day. I have a writing schedule, I have a practice schedule, and I tend to shoot later in the evening. For the most part, all of those genres get along. What is a challenge, however, is money.
Naomi: You don’t say!
Truth: So let’s be real! Let’s be real. I would love to be in a position in my life where all I could do, Brother Michael and Elizabeth and Naomi, is create. I would love that. I pray for that. But that’s not the case. Not as we speak today. If I’m wrestling with [00:14:00] anything, it’s a way to be able to provide for my family. Shout out to my wife, Cherry, and my son, Soweto. And also be able to express myself artistically.
Naomi: Along these lines, with all of these creative disciplines it seems that, you capture these moments of keen perception and distill them down and transmute them into something else. Do you have a childhood memory, a favorite childhood memory of perceiving or sensing, and did this way of understanding and experiencing the world differ from the way other folks experience the world. In your opinion. You know, there’s like awareness and consciousness that we have this space within which as creatives we create and spread out and become familiar with this landscape of ours. [00:15:00]
Truth: That awareness came when I was a bit older, to see the power of art in the world. It happened in my house indirectly, because my mother always played great music. She played Nina Simone. She played Aretha Franklin, who was an activist in her own right. So I was filled with that music and the power, but didn’t realize its connection to the wider world until I got to be older. Nikki Giovanni again, the witness of poets, going to that auditorium and seeing a room packed with folks who had come to listen to one person read something that they created struck me. And it pressed upon me that art was something that could move people and be a great force of good in the world. Those kinds of things.
And [00:16:00] DC was also much, as I recall it then, a place that was like that. For example, on Georgia Avenue, although it’s very different now, there were Black bookstores and people rocking dashikis, and there were people in Malcolm X Park, now sometimes called Meridian Hill, I believe, but we called it Malcolm X Park, and people were there, and they were—
Naomi: Some of us still do.
Truth: Respect. It was a thing in certain clubs. People were there meeting and celebrating Black culture. That renaissance was something that struck me too. To feel good about being Black was something that I learned in DC distinctly.
Naomi: That is directly linked to your experience of DC as a sense of cultural space.
Truth: Yes.
Naomi: Where you could feel free in your identity as a Black man.
Truth: Yes. Absolutely. [00:17:00] And it still is unique in that way.
You must remember that in 1968, Dr. King was assassinated. There were tanks, I saw as a child, rolled down Eastern Avenue. That also gave me an awareness of the world, of this country, that struck me. I remember the day he was assassinated, running into a little White boy who was in my school, who was crying, coming up the street. And he said, “We killed him.” Now, I couldn’t understand why he was crying or why he would say that. But all of those things impressed upon me the importance of many things. Speaking out against wrong. That there were people who did that. And that, perhaps that was something that I should think about doing later on down the road.
Naomi: And this part not to hold on too tightly to this, but this part where you have that moment, that awareness where you think, okay, I see, I’m [00:18:00] perceiving, I’m here, I’m present in the world, present with this reality that surrounds me, and that the creative impulse to create and knowing, I have to do this this has got to be done.
Truth: Yes.
Naomi: Can you talk a little bit about, was there a moment in your life where you became aware or a group of moments or a time period where you thought, this is just what’s going to happen?
Truth: It happen. gradually. I remember walking around with a boombox back in the day and listening to Marvin Gaye. When we had a radio, and that was our only means of accessing music and tapes, and I would rock Marvin all day long. And I knew he was saying something important, and I was inspired by that.
Much later on, Stevie Wonder, I remember going to Capital Center back in the day to see Stevie Wonder. Again, the arena was packed. [00:19:00] One cat in the middle on the piano. One cat. Crushed it. Talking about knowledge. Talking about activism. And, of course, being a virtuoso. I said, Yeah. This is art. This is the power of art.
Later on, Gil Scott-Heron, Sweet Honey in the Rock, all of these people, wonderful Celia Cruz, all of these people speaking out, Muhammad Ali. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Rumble, young man, rumble. Saying my name is Muhammad Ali.” All of these things struck me over time
Elementary school, junior high school, by the time I got to high school, I knew I was an artist. Of course, that was not something my mother was comfortable with in the beginning, but I remember at Howard it becoming very clear because I spent most of my time in the practice room in fine arts learning how to write songs when I should have been in political science [00:20:00] class because I was a political science major. And when I first went to Howard, I was like, I’m going to be a lawyer. And then I went to fine arts and started singing and playing and being around other artists and ended up being asked to tour with a play that went, I think it was to Colorado. And the director of the play, on the course of the tour, asked me on the bus what my major was. And I said, “Political science. I’m going to be a lawyer.” He says, “You’re not a lawyer. You’re an artist.” That confirmation helped. So, it happened gradually.
So about three years into my journey at Howard, I left school—I’d been playing all around DC, had a band, it was a blessing, called Members Only. We were rocking the Members Only jackets back in the day with George Jones and Michael Page, Michael Smith, Angelo Ray, and I’m leaving out somebody. This is where you want to come back. [00:21:00] But I got on a bus with my boombox and a guitar, took a Greyhound bus out to LA, and stayed with a guy who told me if I ever came to LA to look him up. And so I did. And I moved in with this brother, Wayne Mason, who was actually a lawyer. Had this little efficiency in the hood, straight up hood. But for me, LA was wonderful because there were palm trees. I didn’t care if people were pissing on them. There were palm trees. The weather was nice. You could go to the beach and you didn’t have to pay. I remember going to Santa Monica, taking the bus from Mid-Wilshire down to Santa Monica and getting to the beach and it was beautiful. You could go out, and I was expecting somebody to call me back and say, you can’t go there. But they didn’t do that. That was wonderful, [00:22:00] staying in this place with this very crowded apartment, but still gigging around LA. And two months later, I was signed. Two months later, I was signed.
Elizabeth: Let’s talk some more about this part of your journey, your creative journey as a musician, as a singer-songwriter. In those days you were known as Glenn Edward Thomas, and as you mentioned, before you emerged as a poet, you were a working musician, and you signed with Capitol Records as a recording artist. I didn’t know about the trip to LA and all of that but I’m super interested in knowing how that emergence as a working musician, as a singer-songwriter, how the sort of drifting away of your aspirations to be a lawyer, and how your mom felt about that, and just—
Truth: It didn’t drift away. I threw them overboard.
Elizabeth: [00:23:00] Just tell us a little bit more about those, just some of the stories and some of the steps along that journey as a singer-songwriter, and your life as a musician, and also how that really informed your life as a poet.
Truth: Again, they’re all different ways of telling stories. Lyrics are stories. I didn’t think about it in those times when I was mainly focused on recording and music. And when I was working with Don, I was thinking about writing the best songs I could. And a part of that process is similar. One of the things that Don Cornelius used to tell me is that one of the mistakes that a lot of songwriters make is that they stop revising, they give up too soon. They write something and they stop. And in the beginning, that was me. I was like, it’s done, the song is finished. On to the next one. [00:24:00] So, I learned a lot from him. I learned to revise songs.
There’s a community in music that is also beautiful. Music is collaborative experience. Poets tend, at least in my experience, to write, create alone. They often have a need to do that, to get away from distractions, to focus, although they may collaborate sometimes. It’s a different kind of culture, different kind of community. I wasn’t as focused on that in LA as I was when I left LA.
Everything in LA, just like Tennessee, was not beautiful. I learned to have fear of police in Los Angeles. This later informed my poetry profoundly. I learned about the mistreatment of the immigrant population in Los Angeles, Latinos. I would be driving—we lived in [00:25:00] Mid-Wilshire, and also I used to live in the West Valley, San Fernando Valley—and there are many occasions where I would see LAPD have brothers, Brown and Black, on the sidewalk, just cuffed. This was an everyday thing. Helicopters circling over—and I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a place where helicopters fly over all the time. It feels oppressive.
Naomi: Sure does. Gets you on edge, an edge that’s hard to get off of. Yeah.
Truth: Yes. It engenders anxiety. And there is a cultural anxiety you feel in different parts of Los Angeles. LA is very segregated. If you go from east to west, and you travel down Wilshire, if you go north in Wilshire, for example you might end up in Beverly Hills. You go south in Wilshire, end up in Compton, [00:26:00] South Central, headed in that direction. I learned to fear the police. I learned about injustice that I witnessed. And I was racially profiled there so much. You make eye contact, you get stopped. That happened all the time. Those things, although I didn’t realize it in those days, would greatly impact my poetry, later to come.
Elizabeth: That sort of feeds into this other question we wanted to talk to you about in terms of your studies in political science and I’m struck with what you said about the collaborative nature of music and the music discipline and music industry and how people of all perspectives come together and there’s a combining of creative energies versus the poet who is a more solitary creator. But then you have a political consciousness that was informed by your early studies of political science and then you’ve experienced different contexts, be they, as you’ve talked about, geographic or religious [00:27:00] contexts or social. Can you talk a little bit about how these political perspectives, these different perspectives that you had some sociological understanding of, as well as your own experience of, and how that characterized your understanding of the larger world, the public sphere, and just how you translated and processed and really digested all of that information and perspective that’s coming at you.
Truth: The connectedness to the larger world and my realization of it came later. Again, when I left Los Angeles, for the most part. Now I’m going back and forth in time, but at Howard I learned that all things are political. In LA I learned about different cultures. They were segregated. They were vibrant. When I went to London, by the way, I was profiled in London too, don’t let anybody tell you that [00:28:00] racism does not exist in the UK, it is very much a lie. It just plays out differently. But when I went to Europe, I certainly saw the impact of art, especially art that is created in America has on the world, and it made me think about my place in all of that. I was seen as an American, a Black American. As soon as you open your mouth, they know. You can’t run away from that. And you’re treated as an exotic.
Naomi: Yeah, that’s what you’re called. That’s what you’re called. I’ve been called an exotic before. Everybody.
Truth: Like, what? If they don’t know, you’re a half-cast, like I am, right? That’s very different from the experience of Black British folks, who are not seen as exotic, who in Brixton, which is but not exactly like Harlem, are harassed by the police, just like they’re harassed [00:29:00] in Los Angeles, just like they’re harassed in New York City. And I saw all of that.
And I also saw how music touched the world and art touched the world. Bob Marley had a big impact on me as well. When I was there in Brixton, I love Brixton, if you ever go, and you want to get some food—this is no shade on, but I’m just saying, I’m just letting you know. You need to go to Brixton and get you something to eat. And you might find open air markets early in the morning where people are playing Bob Marley. This one man who had the courage to speak up and say something in the interest of love, and bringing all people together, moved the planet with his words. Musical gifts, yes, but words. Get up, stand up for your rights. One love, all of those things were sinking in and [00:30:00] changing the focus of my writing.
When I was in Los Angeles, I was very much caught up in the traditional commercial music scene. That didn’t work out for me for many reasons. When I got to London, I was no longer interested in that kind of music career. I wanted to write music that mattered to people that was activist. And I encourage everybody to go if you’re able to because—you were talking about connecting to the world and the differences. Here, and you noticed, if you turn on the radio, except for PFW, shout out to PFW, you’ll hear rock on one station, country on another, R&B on another, hip hop on another, but they don’t mix. In London, you have one or two stations. They play everything. It challenged my belief about what had to be.
I also saw myself differently. When I first got to London, I looked [00:31:00] at people who were coming from West Africa, and the West Indies, dressed in traditional clothes. And they didn’t have perms. They had dreadlocks. They were wearing traditional clothes. And I thought something was wrong with these people. They didn’t look like the Jet and Ebony magazines that I had been reading. What’s wrong with these folks? After about six months, I lived with a Jamaican family. We lived both there with my wife. We lived with a Jamaican family. Beautiful family. After about six months there, I picked up a copy of Ebony magazine and I realized the problem was not these people. It was me. And the cultural baggage I had. That also taught me something about responsibility that I had to share that perspective when I got back home. And whatever I created.
Elizabeth: Yeah it’s something I was going to ask you about. We, today, in 2025, we live still in a really polarized, broader society. There are all [00:32:00] these forces that are intent on reducing most of us to very crude stereotypes, I think, that’s still going really strong. And so it sounds like that you began to navigate these highly polarized camps many years ago. And that navigation and that kind of stepping away from all these, kind of, rigid assumptions about people and about yourself informed your own creativity. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Truth: In London, one of the things that I saw that surprised me at first was White old ladies pushing strollers with Black babies in them. Which is something that I had never seen before. And it was not striking, it was not abnormal. Nobody whipped their heads around to witness this anomaly. It was a normal part of the culture.
Elizabeth: So were these grandmothers pushing grandbabies? Or were these nannies? [00:33:00]
Truth: Yes, they were their children. No, these were their children.
Elizabeth: These were their grandchildren.
Truth: These were their children, yes. I also had the great privilege of working with a lot of Irish musicians. And I learned that Irish folks catch the same hell as Black folks in London. And I didn’t know that before. It made me see all people as people, more than I had before. So when I came back home, again, I wanted to write and remember that. Because I knew once I got here it would be harder to do. Because people are going to tell me, “You’re DEI. You don’t belong here.”
Naomi: Your new initials.
Truth: Yes.
You don’t exist. You’re LBTQIA. We don’t see you. You don’t exist. You’re Latina. You’re Latino. You don’t exist.” But we are here. We’re all over the place. And we’re all human beings. Except for Donald Trump. Most of us are homo sapiens. See, that was a joke.
All of those things made me rethink my approach [00:34:00] to art and reinforced my mission to bring everybody together, to speak to everybody, knowing that we are all much more alike than we are unalike.
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Part 2
In part two of our Creativity and Difference conversation with Truth Thomas, we discuss his life as an artist, educator, publisher, and writer. Our talk culminates with Truth acknowledging the challenges of being the Poet Laureate of Howard County, Maryland. That ambassadorial role requires him to speak to all the people of the county, and in his divisive times, love has never been so important.
Naomi: Truth, going back to a sense of place. You’ve lived in Tennessee—beautiful woods in Tennessee, by the way. Beautiful. I’ve hiked through them. I was a little scared, but they’re beautiful country. Tennessee, DC, LA, London. What are your thoughts about navigating the different sensibilities, the different vibes of each place? Each place has its own culture, plus its own vibes, and then multiple ones if it’s one that’s segregated. And it depends on how you navigate those spaces, what vibes you’re exposed to. So, can you talk a little bit about that? And also, I have a different experience of myself in [00:35:00] those different spaces. Like in DC, an open person in a way. I don’t feel I can be as free in other places, for example. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Truth: Yes. First of all, Sister Naomi, what’s the name of your last book again?
Naomi: Oh my god, now I’m spacing it out because I’m out of context here.
Elizabeth: The Incantations?
Naomi: Yeah, Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations.
Truth: Everybody at home, clap for her one time if you will. I was signing with my brother Michael earlier about Whitman, “Song of Myself.” We all have different songs. Based on who we are in America. Based on who we are culturally. Even though it’s made up, who we are in terms of race. Who we consider ourselves to be. You’re a very brave sister because I am not going hiking in the woods alone in Tennessee. I’m not.
Naomi: People—women had [00:36:00] disappeared around that time. Oh, that’s a whole other story. Not for this. This is about. Not for this podcast. But, yeah. It was scary. Yeah. It was scary, but it’s beautiful country.
Elizabeth: This is about Naomi’s hiking the Appalachian Trail by herself.
Truth: You did that?
Naomi: Yeah.
Truth: Oh my gosh.
Naomi: However many years ago.
Truth: Everybody at home pray right now that she never does this again.
Naomi: Oh, it’s a different country already. It’s a different place.
Truth: It is. We had a reading recently. You had a reading with Harem Liru.
Naomi: Ah, yes. Related to nature.
Truth: And it was beautiful. It was beautiful. Every time I think about crows, I think about your poetry. I’m paraphrasing. How you should be good to them. Because they remember. That’s wonderful. That’s your relationship to nature, and it’s wonderful. My relationship is different. I’m not going in the woods. I feel much more comfortable in the roughest block of the roughest hood than [00:37:00] going in the woods in West Virginia. I might go, but I am not at all comfortable.
Each place has a different culture. Each place is beautiful in its own way. DC has a very political accent. London is very multicultural. If you want to get some good food, and you can afford it, go to Paris. Great. LA has its own wonder and beauty, even though climate change and wildfires—I’m praying for them—is a real issue that does not seem to be going away, though I pray that it would.
There’s great vibrancy among all people everywhere. Again, there is much more that we have in common than what separates us. That’s the lesson that I’ve learned. That’s something that I want to try to encourage people to remember, especially now when we have this rise of authoritarianism and people voraciously attempting to separate folks, to mistreat people, to practice a renewed and overt racism in America. That knowledge-art [00:38:00] that I think you create and that all of us in some way here create is very important to express. To fight it. However fierce it may present itself as being, we have to fight it.
Naomi: Thank you. And how about creating in those spaces? And how do you find creative momentum differently in those spaces? Because creating in London and LA may be different than creating in DC for you and in Columbia. Tell me about that.
Truth: That’s a good question. Let me preface my answer by saying, after the recent election, I was torn up for two days after the results. I didn’t know what to write a saying. I didn’t know what to take a picture of. I was lost. And since that time, the number of attacks against democracy have been unfolding at such a rate it’s often hard to keep track of.
After about a week or so, [00:39:00] I remembered who I was as a child of God. And so now, I return to praying every day. And God directs what I write, what I take a picture of, what I sing about. Every day, I return to that strategy, because I can’t answer tit for tat every jab that evil throws. Whether it’s in London, or Columbia, or DC, or wherever I am. Now, that’s my focus. It’s been like that at other times too, especially when you’re broke in London, it’s prayer time. When you’re broke in LA, it’s prayer time. But I return to God. I do.
Elizabeth: I want to expand upon this whole notion of material reality, whether it’s being broke or whatever, there’s a material reality that we all live in. And I think you, Truth, are someone who’s deeply in tune with this larger world. The gravity of these material realities are [00:40:00] “lived experiences” of your own and other people, the flora and fauna of our known world. You were like living in the material world with a consciousness and a recognition that material struggle, this is a complex question, but I want to talk about material struggle as knowledge, and how that knowledge of struggle shapes creative output.
For example, when the late, great musician and activist Harry Belafonte died in 2023 at the age of 96, the airwaves were filled with his famous “Banana Boat” song, and I’m sure our listeners will remember the lyrics, and I’m not going to try to sing them—you’re a singer so maybe you will—but in listening to this song, I was so struck with how this beautiful melodic song is such a deep lament of the banana workers exhaustion. And the lyrics are about, “Come Mr. Tally Man, tally me banana. Daylight come and we want to go home.” I’m sure people know this [00:41:00] song. It’s a decades-old song, and yet, most of the people on this planet still live lives like the banana workers. They’re not sitting in air conditioned offices working on computers. They’re bent over in fields or quarries or fishing boats or in the countryside, in kitchens, or laundries, or brothels, or wherever in the cities, doing this cruel, grueling physical labor that the rest of us depend on and take for granted.
And so this exhaustive labor, here’s my point, this exhaustive labor that is almost unfathomable to most of us comfortable Westerners, this is a kind of knowledge. Extraordinary creativity flows out of these hard times music or dance or song or art. And so I want you to talk and delve deeper into how your own work appreciates these material realities.
Truth: That’s an excellent question. I just write about them, bear witness to the suffering of other people. That’s what [00:42:00] Harry Belafonte was doing.
Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Kendrick Lamar, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Naomi Ayala, the late Ruben Jackson, bless his soul. We’re all bearing witness to the suffering of others, those people who are often voiceless, in an effort to mediate that wrong.
Yes, I simply write about those things as much as I can, as honestly as I can. Let people know, as you well mentioned, the folks cleaning the halls of the White House now more than likely, late at night, somewhere, are immigrant folks. As much as there is a public demonization of immigrants in Congress, where I work, I’m a professor of humanities at Howard Community College, late at night, the people who are taking the trash out are Latinos. The people who are taking care of the grounds are Latinos. Working. And somebody has to tell their stories.
A lot of those [00:43:00] folks are filled with fear right now. Because of the hateful language and policies that have been promoted in our country. Somebody has to say that it’s wrong. It’s not an easy thing to do all the time. But if we don’t have the courage to speak out against those wrongs, when somebody comes against us, there may not be anyone left to speak.
Elizabeth: You talked about somebody’s got to write those stories, and I’m reminded of years ago when Michael and I were running Sanctuary Theater, we did a production of Derek Walcott’s Ti-Jean and His Brothers. And Walcott, who was not yet the Nobel Prize winner in literature, but he came down and saw the show and hung out with us and spoke to the audience. And he talked about these pivot points in literary and artistic history where an oral culture first is captured onto the page or into image form in some way. That these were moments of great [00:44:00] literary and artistic achievement. And it was a deep and a complex conversation he had with the audience. But it was a, basically, I think what he was saying is that the density of experience, of all of this experience of oral cultures and of all this struggle and suffering and endurance is equal to or greater than the density of all this abstraction that is central in Western culture.
We in the West, or the Western intellectual tradition tends to honor the philosophy and the theology and all of this complex mathematical equations, et cetera. But people who have endured for generations doing a kind of grueling labor and living within oral cultures have a density and a depth of art, artistry and creativity that is just as sophisticated and complex [00:45:00] as the theoretical physicist’s equations, etc.
You are somebody who captures this density in your music, in your photography, in your poems. And I guess I’m wondering what the experience is when you’re perceiving of a level of density, or intensity, or sophistication, or complexity, I guess is the word I’m looking for, and how you bring that into into a form that communicates with others, be it through song, music, image, poem, et cetera.
Truth: That’s a great question. I don’t think about it in those terms. What I would say, first of all, is that the art that God has blessed me to be able to create is equal to that of anybody else. And I let people know that. I don’t have to prove myself to some Western aesthetic. I’ve been blessed to write more poems and songs than I can [00:46:00] remember, and I’m getting to that same place in photography. My focus is simply to create that knowledge-art, as I would call it, as many people have done before me. And respect all traditions. And say to everyone, what we all do has value. Yours is not more valuable than mine. My language is not more valuable than yours. That’s something that I work on actively.
Naomi: I wanted to see if we could talk a little bit more about creative process itself and the blending of the different genres and disciplines. Can you talk a little bit about the similarities and differences between merging your process as a poet with your process as a photographer, and how these intersect for you. What is your main through line, is it the lyric, is it rhythm, is it tone, line, movement? How do you see [00:47:00] this?
Truth: Photography has been a great anchor for me because it forces me to slow down—I didn’t even mention this—and appreciate people, and the world, and nature from a distance. In ways that I had not, and would not have done otherwise. I also title my pictures as poetically as I can. That informs poems that I’ll write later. So there’s a direct relationship between the two and I’m going to work on hybrid books of poems and photography. Music is different because, as I mentioned, it’s more collaborative. You have bands. Everybody, ideally in a great band, should have a say. That’s not the way with poets. Quite often, unless you’re in some MFA program where people are supposed to workshop and tear you pieces apart, it’s different in that way.
I [00:48:00] do spend a lot of time alone, more than I used to, now that I’ve started getting very serious about photography. That has also been good for my poetry. Not so good for my relationship with my wife, who worries about me when I go out and shoot in places that might be a little dangerous.
But to your question earlier, Elizabeth, knowing when I was an artist, I feel compelled to do that. My focus now tends to be as much as possible to turn off all distractions to those things that I feel compelled to create. Whether it’s music or it’s poems, primarily poetry right now, but more and more photography as well.
Naomi: So the silence informs your creativity. Space. Physical, psychological, getting space to yourself informs the creative process for you and also the image. Your poems may be informed by your photographs first. I love your photographs. I’m a [00:49:00] big fan.
Truth: Thank you.
Naomi: And I revel in the fact that, it’s called still photography, right? And the impact that it has on me as a viewer is always it stills me. You capture this moment that one would think of as typically as frozen, like one-dimensional in space. And for me, that’s not the experience. The experience is just movement, and it’s still going, and then it stills me. So there’s like this dance with your images that I love and it just makes absolute perfectly good sense to me that it’s informed by space to yourself, by solitude. Being in relationship with yourself so that you can be in relationship with the world around you, however dangerous or not.
Truth: Yes. Let me say that you see people differently if you really look at it. And I’ve been inspired by Gordon Parks and the way that he used his camera as a tool of [00:50:00] activism. That, that greatly moves me, and that’s some big shoes to fill, and I’m not trying to, I just want edge in that direction. But you, when you see people authentically, it’s moving. Not posed, unrehearsed, and captured. It’s a different kind of storytelling that I pursue now, that I hadn’t really done before. And to be honest, I thought I knew DC until I started taking pictures of DC. If I took my camera out every day for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t be able to capture it completely. And that’s wonderful. So I have something to push for and to understand people. People are beautiful and awful. All that’s a mix of great stories.
Naomi: Yeah, thank you. I also wanted to ask you about the skinny. It’s not every day that a poet gets to invent a poetic form, and to invent a poetic form that sticks and stays. The skinny is a [00:51:00] single-stanza poem of eleven lines that you created in Tony Medina’s poetry workshop at Howard in 2005. Can you tell us a little bit more about the form. What inspired you to create it, how did it catch fire with other poets, and can you share one skinny poem?
Truth: Sure, sure. Dr. Medina had a workshop in those years. He may still have such workshops. And they were boot camps of poetry, tougher than, I’ve heard, some MFA programs.
Naomi: Indeed.
Truth: And Medina is a poet’s poet. He is. He introduced us to a multitude of forms, and I love them all. Got to tinkling, poetry tinkling, and came up with the Skinny. The Skinny is an eleven-line form where the second, sixth, and tenth lines of the poem have to be comprised of the same word. The other lines, not repeated, can be as any poet [00:52:00] chooses them to be. The skinnies can be linked like haiku or tanka. And I created the skinny to tell the truth. It sounds a little self-serving, but yeah, I wanted it to tell the truth. To be about more serious subjects. And I still do. That was the origin story of the poem. Now, why it’s become very popular, I really couldn’t tell you. I’m happy, I’m thankful to God that it has. But it strikes me, it’s like hit songs. If anybody tells you they know what a hit song is or how to create one, they’re lying. Because if that were true, every day there’d be somebody write, Oh, it’s a hit, it’s a hit, it is. Sometimes things just hit, and I’m thankful for that.
I also want to thank you, and Carmen Calatayud, Melanie Henderson, and Joseph Ross, who helped me edit The Skinny Poetry Journal, because I couldn’t do it without you. The journal has taken off. [00:53:00] We have an open reading period now, by the way. We’ll be accepting poems that fight against racism. But I’m very grateful for that collaboration, because it’s made the form grow even more in popularity. And I thought a lot about what I might read in this era of Project 2025, and assault on democracy. And I’ve decided, ladies and gentlemen, just to read one poem that is a poem within a poem. So I’ll read the poem within a poem first, and this is a skinny:
A Nazi tail wind.
Trumpaganda
runs, climbs the gusts of fascist wind
Nazi
on
a
string
Nazi
streaming
Hitler’s
tail—
Nazis
of fascist climbs, gust. The wind runs.
So that is a Skinny. [00:54:00]
Naomi: Thank you for that.
Truth: Sure. De nada.
Naomi: So I was going to ask you about the magazine. It’s such an honor to to work on this with you. Can you tell us for people who may be listening and young writers, what inspired you to create the magazine? I know you love the form you created, you must, because you continue to create within it, and it must bring you joy that other people use it and it serves them as poets. What inspired you to create the magazine? And if somebody—so we have an open call right now for anti-racism poems, yes—what advice will you give young writers who may want to send in some poems or may want to start their own journal?
Truth: Sure.
Naomi: Can you say a little about that?
Truth: My advice to everyone is to do it. Yes. To have a vision.
Naomi: Just to start.
Truth: To have a vision for what you want to create and follow through with that vision. For Black and Brown writers, [00:55:00] there are not a ton of journals where you can express yourself honestly without having to have work filtered or watered down for the sake of getting published. So that’s one of the reasons I wanted to create the journal, because, as I mentioned, we all exist. So this is an avenue, but not only for Black and Brown folks, for everybody, if you have something that you want to say.
I encourage people to come to the page with some seriousness, as in all poetry. There should be layers, there should be imagery, even in a short poem one of the mistakes I see a lot of writers make when they submit work is they abide by the rules of the form but it’s prose in the form of a poem. Like someone might write prose in the form of a sonnet. It’s not a poem. It’s not a picture. It’s not multilayered. It’s not something that evokes some strong feeling. So I encourage anyone to go for it. Submit something. We accept three poems at a time. [00:56:00] That’s your best work. And we get back to you fairly quickly, unlike some other journals.
Naomi: Yeah, we do. Yeah, absolutely. We have an excellent turnaround time.
Speaking of forms and poetry and all things poetry and creative process, you are the Poet Laureate of Howard County. We get to hear from Poet Laureates their work, they’re to me, they’re like the PR go-to for poetry. They’re out there. No poets move like Poet Laureates move. They make it look so easy, so smooth, and they’re zipping in and out of places doing all they can to promote poetry and good poetry in the world. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you do? Give us a general idea of what the responsibilities are.
Truth: Thank you. I’ve never been called a PR go-to. I love it. I’m honored to be the inaugural support laureate of Howard County. I was appointed by Dr. [00:57:00] Calvin Ball, and I’ll be serving in that role until March, I believe, of 2026. Something along those lines. And I must say that my awareness of what Dr. Ball was attempting to do in Howard County, in the interest of all people, it’s something I knew about long before this appointment. Our interests align. Last year, before the election, it was easier to think about what I might say in my PR role than it is now. When I first got the gig what I said was, Elizabeth, I want to bring people together. That’s what I said. And I meant that. I want to bring folks together. And Michael, that was what I attempted to do. I wanted to bring folks together. I did. That was in my interest. And then, America slipped up and put this proto-fascist in the White House. And some of those same very folks in Howard County, the county where I’m being an Inaugural Poet Laureate, voted for this person. So I have to speak to [00:58:00] all of them in a way that is loving, but does not—
Naomi: Well, you choose.
Truth: Say again?
Naomi: You “have to.” You said you “have to.” Do you have to or do you choose?
Truth: Yes. Yes, I do. I have to. I have to choose love. I have to choose to be loving. I have to follow the leading of God to say what needs to be said to everyone. But that’s not easy when you know that many people you’re speaking to have put someone in power who aims to take away your rights. So now I have to think about what kinds of work I’m going to create that speaks to that sickness in a way that hopes to heal all of us. That’s not something I had to do last year. Not as much as now. That’s been something that is an active focus. And I’m coming hard because I might not get another chance to do that.
Elizabeth: Your comment, Truth, about being loving. [00:59:00] I have been told by someone close to me who has a chronic illness that what is helpful to her from others is that they be loving. Putting aside advice, putting aside, you know, instructions, putting aside agitation, just be loving, which is a message of healing that is pretty, it’s not specific. How is a person to be loving? There are so many dimensions of love and so many steps and so many dimensions of healing.
I was going to use the term poetic diplomacy. Naomi talked about being the PR person for poetry, and I feel like what you’ve just said about being loving is a kind of mission-driven description of your capacity as Poet Laureate to be a sort of healing poetic diplomat.
Truth: It is.
Naomi: A diplomat and, besides, ambassador. [01:00:00] Yeah. And that’s a term that we ought to capture here. A healing diplomat.
Elizabeth: A healing diplomat.
Naomi: Is that what you said? A healing diplomat. That’s a poet. You get to be a medicine doctor of poetry and be a diplomat and navigate those spaces. It’s a real inspiration.
I think that, nowadays, speaking for myself personally, where I am challenged the most is to love. And to love, I have many of the same people in my life and then loving and love should be that way. It is that way. Loving in spite of that, and above all that, and beyond all that, and still being able to be there, present.
Elizabeth: As you said, as a photographer, you take your camera and you go out into the world and you see a complexity and a dimensionality and a fullness to the humanity of the people on the street or in the market or wherever, that is a kind [01:01:00] of x-ray vision, if you will, to their deeper humanity. And that seems to me to be the portal through which the lovingness comes.
Truth: Yes. And you have to be open to that. And not be afraid.
Elizabeth: I want to switch gears a little bit and just zoom in to talk about your work as an educator. Talk about healing—the educators in the world are doing this very complex work of helping other human beings, be they children, teens, or adults, realize their own full potential. Can you talk a little bit about the learning experiences among communities that have engendered creative leaps, both for you and for your students?
Truth: I teach, as I mentioned, humanities. Most of my students are young adults, not all, but most of them are young adults. Ironically, I don’t teach creative writing. I teach my students to examine the question of what it means to [01:02:00] be a human being, to process and document the human experience, and to learn to think for themselves. I leave, when they get to that point, because quite often what happens, I’ve witnessed this, is my students are very much—even though they’re young—indoctrinated, into some very negative beliefs about each other. Homophobia. Hatred of women. Racism, even though they may not recognize it. I am inspired to write often when I hear some of the things that they have said. That’s a transformative experience. So I’m grateful for the opportunity to teach, and to learn from them, and I always learn from them.
Naomi: So one of the final questions hosts in this podcast ask interviewees is, what advice or practical tips would you give our listeners about how to nurture their own creativity? Can you [01:03:00] share?
Truth: Sure. I would encourage them to come to Washington, DC and look for Elizabeth Bruce.
Naomi: I agree!
Elizabeth: There are a bunch of us out there, it’s a pretty common name!
Truth: Spend as much time studying their work and also the work of other masters if you’re a poet, because that work gets inside of you and comes out in your writing. And to remember that poetry’s not a competition. Even though there are a lot of stages that encourage that kind of behavior, that’s not what art is about when you talk about poetry. Hone craft. If you need to enroll in an MFA program to become fully formed, find a way to do it. Find community. That’s important. And work on developing your own voice. That’s also crucial.
In terms of music, for young musicians, what I [01:04:00] would say is, learn that there’s a difference between musicians, folks who love music, and the music business. There are two very different things. And you have to master both if you’re going to be successful in the music industry, and to fight as hard as you can to find an ethical way to navigate in that music world. It’s possible. It’s difficult, but it’s possible.
And for photographers, I still consider myself to be a low belt, if this is martial arts photography. I’m in the dojang, I’m practicing. But from what I’ve learned so far, I think what’s most important is to decide what kind of photography you’re going to do, because there are many kinds of photographers. Sports photographers and wedding photographers, photojournalists. I’m more a documentarian, street photography, because I like [01:05:00] authenticity. Understand that you have to also study those people who’ve come before you. Because that work gets inside of you. And you have to practice. Never get caught up into thinking that it’s the camera that makes you a great photographer. And spend a lot of money, because it is very expensive. Whatever you have, use that, even if it’s a cell phone. But just keep shooting, shoot as many pictures as you can.
One last thing I want to say, something I’m returning to in refrain: We are all here. Despite what some in the country would have us believe right now. Have the courage, young artist. Just speak to that, if you were so inclined. Don’t be afraid. Say what needs to be said. And if you can say it in two languages, palante?
Naomi: Palante.
Truth: Palante. Go for it.
Naomi: That’s right.
Truth: Move forward. Yes. Say what needs to be said, even if people don’t like it. Your job as an artist is not to be liked.
And I [01:06:00] was talking about that with Michael earlier. If everybody likes what you’re doing as an artist, you need to start again. Stir something up. That’s what I would tell them.
Elizabeth: Yeah, that’s really great advice. To work on your craft, to find creative community, to just keep—and to do it, to just keep working, to try to find your voice, and not get discouraged, and not get sucked into a kind of competitive, the zero-sum game thing. Because the art world will do that to you. It will. There’s a lot of gatekeeping and there’s a lot of, put downs and there’s a lot of stay away, we don’t want you,
Truth: Some of the greatest poets I know, that you read and study, never won a slam. Never won a major award. Never won a Pulitzer.
Elizabeth: Never had an MFA.
Truth: Never had an MFA.
Elizabeth: There was a time when you didn’t.
Truth: Was it Emily Dickinson?
Elizabeth: Yeah, never even left the house.
Truth: And were told their work, when she lived, wasn’t [01:07:00] worth much.
Elizabeth: Yeah, so take heart. It’s advice to ourselves, but also—
Truth: Hope is still the thing with feathers.
Elizabeth: —to fellow poets, musicians, just anyone striving to find a creative voice.
Truth, this has been fantastic. We’d truly like to know what’s next for you, and if you could tell our listeners a little either, events or workshops or publications, and also how they can find out more about you. We’ll list some links on our podcast page, but if you want to share that information.
Truth: I thank God for all of you in this room and whoever may listen. I’m grateful for the time that I’ve had to share with you. My plan, quite simply, is to write and create as long as I can, as best as I can. God willing, I’ll put out other books and hybrid books of poetry and photography and make more music that I’ll share. But I want to [01:08:00] be sure that whatever I do, I’m sure demonstrates growth that I can see in my own work before I put it out. That’s why sometimes I take a long time to do that. But if anybody wants to keep up with me, there’s just one place you can go, and everything will be there, it’s BlueSky, which is like X without the Musk.
Elizabeth: Your handle on Blue Sky, tell us what that is.
Truth: OneTruthThomas on Blue Sky.
Elizabeth: One. Spelled, not “one, but the number 1?
Truth: O-N-E.
Elizabeth: O-N-E? Spelled out.
Truth: Yes. One Truth Thomas. Spelled out. Yes. My personal website, Cherry Castle Publishing, Skinny Poetry Journal. All of that you can go to BlueSky to find. So it’s a one stop shop. There we go. Please support all the artists. Naomi Ayala, Elizabeth Bruce, the dynamic Michael Oliver holding it down with the cans over there.
Elizabeth: The man with his earphones on. [01:09:00]
This has been fantastic. Thank you so much, Truth Thomas, Naomi Ayala, Robert Michael Oliver, over there, audio editing.
Truth: Thank you.
Elizabeth: This is Elizabeth Bruce, and this has been the Creativity and Difference series of Creativists in Dialogue. Thanks so much for listening.
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