For Dr. Mahogany L. Browne, poetry is not simply a practice. It’s a living inheritance, a form of testimony, and a way to keep reconnecting with what matters.

This is “Still We Write,” a series that profiles Black contemporary poets in honor of National Poetry Month. And for this installment, we chatted with Dr. Browne, aka Mo, the award-winning poet, educator, and cultural worker who describes the phrase “Still We Write” as “extremely necessary,” especially in a time that asks artists (Black artists in particular) to move faster, shrink smaller, or translate themselves for ease. Browne says poetry gives us a chance to step out of the “rush, rush, pit-pat machinery” of virality and back into the deeper current of purpose.

“What I love about not being rushed is that it allows us to return to the lineage,” Browne says to BET, naming the way that being Black and writing poetry lives in conversation with those who came before. She pointed to Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” as part of that inheritance, calling it a reminder of “the blueprint, the footprints that she’s set forward” and how today’s writers are still walking, widening, and sometimes rerouting that path.

aint more sky than up

the water ain’t no pushover

the mountain isn’t brave

i speak of the poet 

as if i'm not looking in the mirror

i separate myself 

from the sharp teeth of truth

with this light in my eyes / i decide / 

/ i am less guilty & more american /

queen of nothing

ambassador of debt

matriarch of grief

every language i know is a dying one

That current of purpose runs through everything Browne makes. “My purpose, like the poem ‘Black Girl Magic,’ was just to name all of the ways in which Black women are miraculous, is to take up space and reclaim joy, and our sovereignty, our uniqueness, our one-of-a-kind-ness. And if I do that, then 20 years from now, when my granddaughter, great great granddaughters…when all of the young, Black and brown and other marginalized voices who hopefully, in two decades, are no longer marginalized. This is an attempt to uproot the system,” she says.

Her work carries warmth and urgency in equal measure, and she says that balance comes from writing for herself. “I’m always writing with the young Mahogany in mind,” she says, naming the child who still lives inside the artist — the one who carries hope, wonder, insecurity, and ancestral knowing, all at once. That instinct to protect the younger self, and by extension the younger reader, is part of what gives her poems their tenderness without ever softening the truth. Browne writes honestly, even when that means naming hypocrisy, danger, or grief.

A major part of the award-winning poet’s mission is preserving the stories of Black girlhood and Black womanhood, especially the ones she did not always see reflected in the books she was given. “It is my duty to keep writing their stories so that their voices are never erased and forgotten,” she says. That duty is not abstract. It is personal. It is cultural. It is a form of correction in a literary world that has too often treated Black women’s lives as optional.

“I love telling the stories of folks that look like me, sound like me, come from where my grandmama come from, where my mama come from, because those are the women that raised me. However, I never found their name, likeness, or journeys in the books that I read, whether I was assigned them a book, you know, to read in school, or whether it was just on the bestsellers list, it was very few Black women writers telling the story of Black femininity and what it means to come of age in a country that is hell bent on humbling you, ending you, commodifying your magic, and selling it back to you,” she says.

Browne found writers like Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan when she was going into her 20’s and beyond. Browne said that discovering Black poetic language opened up a whole decade of learning that had not been readily available to her, because those writers were not part of the standard American literary curriculum in the way Keats, Whitman and Shakespeare were — the names she had been made to memorize.

Her reflections on memory are equally layered. Browne shared that she has long relied on pictures and poems to preserve her own life, especially after a serious car accident at 16 affected her memory. Poetry, she said, became “the container” for those memories, allowing her to gather sensory details, historical moments, and personal truth into something she can return to. That impulse now extends to her upcoming adult fiction project about Seneca Village, which she says is rooted in archives, place, and poetic language.

Even with all her accolades, Browne said the honor that surprised her most was becoming Lincoln Center’s poet in residence. The experience, she explained, challenged her assumptions about institutions and allowed her to remain fully herself while speaking up for Palestine, Gaza, Sudan, and Congo. “It changed my mind on what institutions and organizations I thought they're gonna try to make me say things I don't believe in and they're gonna whitewash me. And it was never that,” she said, recalling how meaningful it was to be supported, rather than silenced.

For Browne, poetry is still a public act, a private medicine, and a tool for survival. “It gives voice to the things that they (as in the system) have tried to turn the volume down on. It gives perspective to things that may be overlooked, glossed over, or laughed off. It is a bullhorn for our blood,” Browne said of poetry. 

Poets allow the reader to see the divots in the road. “Toni Morrison, her work does that masterfully,” Browne starts. “Aracelis Girmay, Patricia Smith, Suheir Hammad, Terrance Hayes, Jive Poetic, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Aja Monet, Whitney Greenaway… I love the fact that there is a way to do it. You can write the hard things, and then you throw down a rung, or a ladder for folks to climb up out that pit. We're all living in it. Once you name the thing, how do you bring us all forward to this revelation? I don't think I'm looking for poetry to answer questions. I think I'm looking for poetry to illuminate, and the illumination of those questions allows me to have more insight on what the answer might be.”

Do not bleed for applause, Browne says to young writers, “Write the hard thing.” The goal is not to perform pain, but to metabolize it. And if the reader only remembers one feeling after encountering her work? Browne hopes it is the soul because it matters most. “Just because the poem is written correctly, written well doesn’t mean it’s necessarily soulfully good,” she said. And she is determined to stay “on the side of the soul.”