When I got an invitation to appear as a guest on “No Alibis,” a radio program on UC Santa Barbara’s KCSB, I was nervous. I’m not good at extemporaneous speaking, or at least that’s how it feels from the inside. My go-to tactic in public speaking situations is usually to overprepare, which can be exhausting…but this time I didn’t have time or any questions in advance to prepare. So instead I decided to just trust myself (aka winging it). And it was such a great conversation, in large part because hosts Marisela Marquez and Elizabeth Robinson asked such interesting, thoughtful questions–from the beginning of my involvement with environmental justice work in San Antonio to the meaning of “deceleration” to the transition in my own life from poetry to academia to organizing back again to poetry and fiction.

Here’s the whole show. My segment starts at 20:33, but I’ve included the full broadcast because the second segment–an interview with UCSB Global Studies professor Charmaine Chua and UCLA musicologist Shana Redmond on abolition and the Cops Off Campus Coalition–is so critical right now and always.