As part of the launch of our Spring/Summer 2018 issue, Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts, we sat down with contributors to talk about their work in the issue and more. The following interview is part of this series. Please visit our website to see the complete list of contributors to Let Us Gather, to purchase the issue, or to subscribe.

Tell us a little about your work in Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts: what inspired it, how you came to write it, etc.

I went to an art show, and the artist had a series of paintings he made with nail polish that dripped down the paper—some colors ran down straight, others swerved. I already knew, from painting, that colors sometimes behave differently. They vary in how fast they dry. But here the difference in their movements became apparent. I wrote the poem a few months later while at a residency in the north Georgia mountains.

Do you have a favorite line, image, or scene from this work?

“how a color learns its language”

What is your best piece of advice for aspiring writers?

Live, travel, love, do stuff. Get in the habit of paying attention.

Tell us something fun, strange, or interesting about yourself. It can have to do with writing—or not!

The first time I drank alcohol was during a 6th grade field trip to the beach. I blacked out while swimming. When I came to, on an exam table, post stomach-pumping, my homeroom teacher stood by me, worried, and asked if I needed anything. I slapped him and said, “I want soup.”

What’s on the writing horizon for you/what are you working on now?

I’m working on a new manuscript and translating selected and new poems by a brilliant Croatian poet, Marko Pogačar.

My website is https://andreajurjevic.com/

Andrea Jurjević is a poet and translator from Rijeka, Croatia. Her first poetry collection, Small Crimes, won the 2015 Philip Levine Prize, and her translation of Mamasafari, a collection of prose poems in Croatian by Olja SavičevićIvančević, is forthcoming from Lavender Ink / Diálogos. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches at Georgia State University.