Leah Mirakhor is Lecturer in Ethnicity, Race and Migration (ER&M) at Yale who has published writing in the Yale Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. I had Professor Mirakhor in a class called “Public Writing” last semester, where we as students wrote pieces that drew on our own lives in order to address broader, more “public” issues of race, gender, class, etc. The atmosphere in the classroom that semester was electric. Professor Mirakhor held the space brilliantly: we were galvanized by her commitment to the craft of writing and her respect for us as students. I talked to her about her own creative practice, her time as an undergraduate and graduate student, and her mentors. The emphasis Professor Mirakhor put on the role of mentorship in her life came as no surprise — I deeply value her mentorship and grew enormously as a writer and person from being in her class.
KK: How do you feel your experiences in undergraduate and graduate school have shaped your passions and interests as an academic?
LM: I went to a large university — the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but I was able to have this liberal arts education. There were several classes that were really important to my intellectual and political experience. One of them was Prof. Craig Werner’s “James Baldwin and Miles Davis” class. This class was transformative in terms of my thinking about what a classroom could look like, what you could talk about, and the radical possibilities in reading and discussing the work of James Baldwin alongside other modes of artistic expression. The other class was Prof. Nellie McKay’s “Black Women’s Autobiography.” It was a brilliant class, full of women of color reading work by Black women, and taught by one of the most significant scholars in the country, whose [work] expanded and transformed the canon of American literature. We read Audre Lorde’s Zami, and I recall that was a distinctive text for me, both in terms of what Lorde revealed about her life as a Black lesbian feminist poet, and the way in which she had to rethink and remake a genre that could encapsulate her story, what she termed a biomythography. Her intellect and spirit [as a] radical thinker and writer and activist have stayed with me for years. We also read June Jordan’s autobiography Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood. Years later, I visited the archives of Lorde (at Spelman) and Jordan (at Radcliffe). I read letters each writer had exchanged with other writers of color, mostly women, and how these networks of friendship, mentorship, and love had sustained their works and their lives. In Jordan’s papers, I read some of the letters between her and Prof. McKay. She had never mentioned their correspondence in class. But the letters revealed on an intimate level what she had been doing in her classroom and scholarship: championing the work of Black women writers. She really helped build an infrastructure to help the larger public pay attention to these works.
KK: Can you describe the importance of mentorship in your education?
LM: Prof. McKay got sick when I was in graduate school [in African American studies] and she passed away. But before she did, she told me that a new professor had just been hired in the English Department, Prof. Grace Hong, and that I should find her and take a class with her. So I did. I was 20 years old, it was my second year of grad school. She has been a mentor of mine since then. Like Prof. Craig and Prof. McKay, Grace really modeled mentorship and scholarship for me. Grace was incredibly supportive in terms of things that matter; she would provide really constructive feedback on your essays, meet with you, talk with you about your project. She was [also] really supportive of basically everything I wanted to write about, or I was curious about, my work on Baldwin, the relationship between blackness and Arabness after 9/11, and my non-scholarly essays on contemporary literature and art. Grace helped me find my voice; I always remember asking Grace about finding a model for this or that thing I wanted to write or do. And, she would say, well sometimes there are no models, we have to make them. She also believed in my work, even when I wasn’t so sure.
KK: Who of your mentors have had a strong impact on your own writing?
LM: Rob Nixon was another important figure in terms of writing. One of the things I learned from Rob was how to write with the depth and complexity, but in a way that was as clear as possible. I don’t like the word accessible, I don’t even know what that means. It makes your audience sound kind of like they’re stupid. It wasn’t about “being accessible.” But if you wanted to write for a non-narrow, non-specialized audience that doesn’t share your jargon, you have to make some decisions, and you have to pay attention to your prose. Rob also emphasized the role of non-fiction in a way not championed by other scholars in literary studies-he wanted us to think about the aesthetic and political dimensions of memoirs and essays, instead of just retreating to the novel as the central cite of critique.
KK: How do your experiences of being mentored influence how you mentor other people?
LM: My mentors attuned me to what was possible. If there was something I didn’t know that I could do, they made me think I could do [it]. I’ve always wanted to be able to do that for my students. The other thing they shared was their intense curiosity, and [their sense of] responsibility that went beyond their scholarship. They were all activists and invested in their communities. That was always kind of circulating in my head: how to be a writer and a person in the world I wanted to live in… So, these scholars and thinkers have helped me build what is important to my thinking, writing, and teaching. Foregrounding interdisciplinarity, women of color feminisms, acknowledging the world outside of the classroom as we read Baldwin or Lorde or Berger or Kumar, the practice of mentorship, and building communities and coalitions beyond prescriptive categories of belonging — what Rod Ferguson and Grace Hong call “strange affinities.” And, I think our Writer/Rioter class was the culmination of these things; it was as I’ve said a kind of magical alchemy — where we thought and wrote alongside these issues. Your class transformed me and continues to inspire me. Really. Your commitment, your ideals, your collaborations with one another.
KK: How do you see the role of community within the work that you do?
LM: I also think one of the most important things for me has been sustained relationships with women of color who have supported me, and I have tried to support, too. We have been sharing ideas, listening to one another, reading one another’s works, sending each other materials, complaining, laughing, celebrating. There are going to be times when you don’t want to do something, or you just don’t think you can do something, and you’re going to need people around that can protect you, but can also push back against despair or disillusionment. That’s really important. You have to find your people; they will be there when you make your mistakes. They will also be there to share in your joy.
KK: What else is important to your own writing practice?
LM: I’ve learned over time to pay attention to my experience. To take it seriously. To keep a log of the art you’re looking at, the books you’re reading, the music you’re listening to, to pay attention to your interactions with your lovers and your friends. Sometimes between classes or after class, I’ll just go into the British Art Gallery and look at a particular painting for a while. Just sit with it. I think it’s really important to build those sort of practices of reflection, solitude, attentiveness. They draw you into a more vulnerable space.
KK: How do you document that? Do you journal?
L: I do. I journal less now than I used to. I’ll carry a little notebook, or I’ll take notes on my phone. Sometimes those things may appear years later in a piece I’m writing on. Amitava Kumar has this practice where he’s been sketching every day. He practices a strong, daily discipline. And, that’s the only way to do it.
KK: Any last thoughts?
LM: I want to also emphasize writers that have taught me a lot about criticism and scholarship that weren’t scholars. Jonathan Gold, a food writer that recently passed away taught me a great deal about the art of criticism. He was the voice of Los Angeles. He could write about food in a way that was inspiring and heartbreaking and beautiful and moving and funny and idiosyncratic. Gold wrote about a Sonoran taco the way a critic with write about Rembrandt. He wasn’t interested in writing a bad review. Which is to say, he wanted to focus his energies on what he thought needed attention. He knew that a review really could ruin a chef’s livelihood. And, so he wrote with expansive generosity and grace — attuned to every detail. Gold could make you look at the world the way he did — with vividness, with depth, with love. Criticism for him was not about posturing, knocking down, but a radical engagement with the world he lived in, and longed for.
Interview With Professor Leah Mirakhor was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.