[{"id":495,"date":"2026-04-06T19:57:58","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T19:57:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/?p=495"},"modified":"2026-04-06T19:57:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T19:57:58","slug":"interview-with-volume-57-ronald-moran-prizewinner-in-poetry-dominique-ahkong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/2026\/04\/06\/interview-with-volume-57-ronald-moran-prizewinner-in-poetry-dominique-ahkong\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Volume 57 Ronald Moran Prizewinner in Poetry Dominique Ahkong"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This interview was conducted by Assistant Editor Nell Kriegel with Dominique Ahkong, recipient of the Ronald Moran Prize in Poetry for her poem \u201cA Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend\u2019s Father,\u201d featured in SCR<\/em> Volume 57.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Nell Kriegel:<\/strong> In addition to your work as a poet, you serve as an editor for Sh\u014d Poetry Journal\u2014how do you navigate the balance between your editorial mindset and your creative work? Do you find it challenging to \u201cturn off\u201d the editor while you\u2019re writing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dominique Ahkong:<\/strong> This was a problem for me in my 20s and 30s; pulling all-nighters before a deadline was the only way I could squeeze past my inner editor. As an editor now, I try to approach work with curiosity, and I often read poems intuitively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since reading submissions as well as producing and promoting the journal takes up much of my time and energy, most of my writing happens between reading periods. I tend to write in bursts and often get so caught up in the excitement that I sometimes over-edit poems as they form. I\u2019ve learned to avoid revisiting my own poems in the evening and know when I need to leave them alone for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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NK: <\/strong>In your poem \u201cA Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend\u2019s Father\u201d the form is a long block of text; how do you decide which poems are suited for line breaks and which ones lean into prose? What\u2019s the motivator behind this form?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA:<\/strong> I originally composed \u201cA Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend\u2019s Father\u201d in free verse. I was working on a group of poems that each began with the title \u201cTimes I Said Nothing.\u201d The poems sat for ten years before I took them up again, and \u201cA Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend\u2019s Father\u201d was the first to take shape. I remember trying to write it as a duplex: the form helped me voice lines that felt true to the experience, but I was also taking broad liberties with variations on the repeated lines, and the syllabic count was off\u2014maybe not a duplex, I thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I\u2019m feeling stuck with a poem, I sometimes box it up as a prose poem to see what\u2019s going on. I read my poems aloud as I compose and revise; musicality is important to me. Over time, my memory of this incident has solidified into a block. On one hand, there\u2019s a long-haul flight and the heaviness of feeling drugged, and on the other hand, there\u2019s the active mind pushing doubt back and forth. When I changed the title, things clicked into place for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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NK:<\/strong> “When I Met You\u201d closes with the line, \u201cI will become whatever I become.\u201d Do you see poetry as a mode of becoming? More broadly, how intertwined is writing with your sense of identity\u2014and how necessary is it to you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA:<\/strong> In college I had a poetry professor who championed my work but gave me very little feedback. He said: 1) You have to go deeper; and 2) You should be reading more contemporary poetry. That was it. Looking back on it now, that was exactly right. I\u2019ve been a reader for most of my life, but at the time, I was so burnt out that I stopped reading books for a few years. I was steeped in film\/video, interactive media, and photography, where my work could be personal but less vulnerable. But I missed paper, the physical page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At some point I took an interest in book arts, which brought me back to poetry. I also left the tropics and found myself, for the first time, surrounded by space, and quiet, with a study of my own. It\u2019s taken about 20 years for me to inhabit the practice, but yes, I consider poetry my life work\u2014both reading\/studying contemporary poetry and writing poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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NK: <\/strong>There\u2019s a line of yours that is just so stunning\u2014 \u201cI begged to be useful, knowing nothing is too small to be useful: brackets in a sum or a decimal point or a stub still wagging.\u201d The attention to small details feels so essential to the poem\u2019s impact. How do you scale in your writing, balancing both expansive ideas and those precise, intimate details?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA: <\/strong>This poem came together very quickly for me. I was already in the writing zone and remember sitting down with the title to meditate on an experience. Instead, I ended up with this poem. I don\u2019t really think about scope when I\u2019m writing\u2014I might think about that sort of thing if a poem isn\u2019t working and I\u2019m trying to approach it from a different angle, but for the most part, I write intuitively. I\u2019d been listening to Alice Coltrane\u2019s Ptah the El Daoud<\/em> and ended up following the current.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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NK: <\/strong>What themes do you find moving right now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DA:<\/strong> I\u2019ve been trying to carve out space to work towards my first collection. Secrecy, silence, and shame are key themes, along with migration, inheritance, and ritual. Faith and caretaking are other layers beneath that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This interview was conducted by Assistant Editor Nell Kriegel with Dominique Ahkong, recipient of the Ronald Moran Prize in Poetry for her poem \u201cA Man Who Looks Like Your Best Friend\u2019s Father,\u201d featured in SCR Volume 57. Nell Kriegel: In addition to your work as a poet, you serve as an editor for Sh\u014d Poetry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4181,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[411,1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[36163],"class_list":["post-495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-uncategorized"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4181"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":465,"date":"2026-03-01T12:59:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T12:59:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/?p=465"},"modified":"2026-03-06T15:59:52","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T15:59:52","slug":"ongoing-scr-contributors-at-awp-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/southcarolinareview\/2026\/03\/01\/ongoing-scr-contributors-at-awp-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Ongoing: SCR Contributors at AWP 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Our South Carolina Review writers and friends are scattered across the map, but AWP is where we come together. Below, we\u2019re highlighting and celebrating our writers\u2019 events in Baltimore this week \u2014 and we\u2019ll keep updating the list as details arrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stevie Edwards<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Poetry editor, Stevie Edwards hits the scene Wednesday night in Baltimore and will be all over AWP until it ends on Saturday. Want to know where she’ll be? See below!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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