“I can think of many, too many, examples of (unconscious or conscious) framing of work by poets of color as unliterary, ‘light verse,’ ‘performance poetry,’ or whatever dog whistle might be on the go at any time. As someone who cut their teeth on revising critical histories of neglected modernist women’s poetry, I am deeply conscious of the ways in which identity is invoked to undercut the seriousness of craft, to collapse the distance between the author and the literary value of their text as though they were one and the same. As I’ve also written elsewhere, in the long-term, a real and meaningful shift in cultural value must come with critics whose first loyalty is to the work at hand, to reading it knowledgeably and with an awareness of the structural power within which works of literature are produced and received. It is my strong sense that critics of color bring with them a complex awareness of this structural power that is so desperately needed.”