For the second installment of the Long Talk series, the poet and educator, Ladan Osman, who is the winner of the 2020 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for her most recent poetry collection Exiles of Eden and Safia Elhillo, who is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and author of The January Children which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, probe the many intersections of the self, what it means to be free, to experience bliss, to take risks and to experiment.

This conversation considers subjectivity and the violence/tedium of archives that function to keep out certain voices. It offers a template for the writer to think of language as invention and archive-making as an exercise in form-shifting, while also thinking about the vulnerability and responsibility that this kind of writing comes with.