WORD THURSDAYS FEATURING SAFIA JAMA AND TIM HUNT

SAFIA JAMA

Safia Jama was born to a Somali father and an Irish American mother in Queens, New York. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she has published poetry in Ploughshares, Boston Review, World Literature Today, Spoken Black Girl, and Poem-a-Day. Her poetry has also been featured on WNYC’s Morning Edition and CUNY TV’s Shades of US series. Jama is the author of Notes on Resilience, included in the New-Generation African Poets chapbook box set (Akashic Books 2020). Her full-length poetry collection, Crowded House, is forthcoming from Beltway Editions (Fall 2023).  

TIM HUNT

A fourth generation Californian, Tim Hunt was born in Calistoga and raised primarily in Sebastopol, small towns north of San Francisco that were, in the 1950s and 1960s, still agricultural, working-class communities. As a boy, he identified strongly with the Lake County region of his father’s family, an area where quicksilver mining had once been profitable. Here one of his aunts taught him I Can Tell You Are a Logger ’Cause You Stir Your Coffee with Your Thumb, while a rockabilly cousin offered Be-Bop-A-Lula. Before heading east to school, he also discovered such San Francisco Summer of Love wonders as Section 43 by Country Joe & the Fish, and in his teen years dreamed of playing guitar like Carl Perkins and being able to sing like Fred Neil. He has at times claimed he was the lead singer and rhythm guitarist in the band Derridean Debris, which to the best of his knowledge never existed, and was for a time in a band that may have been called Moby-Dick & the See-Men (among other possible spellings).

Educated at Cornell University, he has taught American literature at several schools, including Washington State University and Deep Springs College.  His last gig was at Illinois State University, where he was University Professor of English.  He and his wife Susan, a retired respiratory therapist, have two children: John, a visual artist, and Jessica, a composer. 

Tim Hunt is the author of five collections: Voice to Voice in the Dark (Broadstone Books), Ticket Stubs & Liner Notes (winner of the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award), The Tao of Twang and Poem’s Poems & Other Poems (both CW Books), and Fault Lines (The Backwaters Press).  His scholarly publications include the five-volume edition The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Stanford University Press), The Textuality of Soulwork: Kerouac’s Search for Spontaneous Prose (University of Michigan Press), and Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction (University of California Press).  

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