Hey, Tim Bidermis here. April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, we're returning this week to some of our favorite interviews with poets. Here's Andrew Limbong.

Hi, it's Empire's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbong. In 1964, a 31-year-old salesman named Frank Stafford walked out into the streets of Harlem and saw two

policemen beating up a kid. He asked why, and the cops turned their sights on him. James Baldwin

wrote about this incident and what inspired it in a piece titled A Report from Occupy Territory.

He wrote, no one had, as yet, been charged with any crime, but the nightmare had not yet really begun.

The salesman had been so badly beaten around one eye that it was found necessary to hospitalize him.

Perhaps some sense of what it means to live in occupied territory can be suggested by the fact that the police took him to Harlem Hospital themselves nearly 19 hours after the beating.

That piece was a key bit of inspiration for today's author, Kwame Alexander, and his book of poetry

titled Light for the World to See. It's a lyrical reaction to the murder of George Floyd and

everything else surrounding it. And he told NPR's Rachel Martin why he felt it was important to respond using poetry.

By now, you all are familiar with Morning Edition's Poet in Residence, Kwame Alexander.

But Kwamey is also an award-winning writer, a book author.

And we wanted to spend some time with him this morning

talking about his newest work. It is called Light for the World to See, a thousand words on race

and hope. And I am so glad to have you here this morning. Hi, Kwame. Hey, Rachel. It's been a

world win of a year. It's been a whirlwind of a year.

It's been a world one of a year. We haven't talked in so long. And I found myself over these many

weeks and months, especially this summer, missing you, missing poetry and our conversations.

And now I know why, because you were busy, doing something else, doing something that took more time and thought, right?

Well, I mean, as you know, Rachel, I believe in the power of poetry to engage with us, to inform us, to uplift us, to fuel our imagination in an immediate way that

it can connect with us emotionally. I think that through the listening of a poem or the reading

of a poem about the woes of the world, and we've got a lot of woes right now, we can be inspired.

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