Dominique Christina is a mother, published author of three books, licensed educator, 2x Women of the World Slam Champion, 2011 National Poetry Slam Champion, 2013 National Underground Poetry Individual Slam Champion, social agitator, and intersectional feminist. She is the only person to win the Women of the World Championship twice. Her work is influenced by her family's legacy during the Civil Rights Movement. Her grandfather, who is in the baseball hall of fame, was a shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues. When he left, Jackie Robinson, who later integrated baseball, took his place. Dominique's aunt is a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient for being one of 9 students who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas. Dominique is sought after to teach and perform at colleges and universities nationally and internationally every year. Her work appears in numerous literary journals and anthologies, Huffington Post, IBTimes, Upworthy, Poetry Magazine, etc. She is presently working on season two of the HBO series High Maintenance as an actor and contributing writer. 

Dominique Christina is a force of nature, a shaman of language whose words take a pilgrimage through the malignancies of oppression: the structure of false histories that claim to own our classrooms, our politics, our sexuality, our bodies, our spirituality, our stories, our blood. Christina brings this tumbling fascist, racist, sexist discourse to its knees through the bloody truth of African American boys killed by police who see only race and their right to shoot; but not the life, the child, the man. Christina writes and rips us open: heart, spleen, lungs, psyche, to reveal a relentless avalanche of grief through the eyes of the Mothers who bore, lived, loved, bled these children out. These poems are thick with flesh and blood. They are deeply anchored in the injustice and how we, as a species, must reclaim our power, our anger, our voice, our fire through unleashing these festering lies and secrets and flushing out the continuous atrocities that hide behind our fears of calling them out for each other and ourselves. Christina is not only writing poems that are fraught with absolute mastery, syncopation, and unforgettable metaphors of a prodigious scholar and mesmerizing genius. Christina offers up something priceless. Her body of work, the aftermath of flames and sweat from her corporeal pen make us believe even more strongly in the intoxicating passion of words and that this world can be changed if we dig up those graves and haunt ourselves with the light of scrutiny.
 






Can you speak of your childhood and how you came to find power through words?

*My family is quite matriarchal. They matriculated to Denver from Little Rock Arkansas after a significant amount of trauma from their direct participation in the Civil Rights Movement. (My aunt has a congressional Medal of Honor for being one of nine students to desegregate Central High School under the loose protection of federal marshals) and my grandfather played in the Negro Leagues before baseball was integrated. He is in the Hall of Fame. My mother and grandmother were educators and supernaturally woman. I grew up in a context where mediocrity was not available to me. My family loved poetry. They walked around the house reciting it all the time. Lots of canonical literature: Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, T.S Elliot, ee cummings, but also Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni and writers from the Harlem Renaissance like Countee Cullen and Claude McKay. They introduced me to how possible language is; how delicious it is. 


Does place wield into your poetry?

  *I grew up in Denver Colorado in a middle class neighborhood that still had its drunks and pedophiles but certainly also had the church-goers, the school teachers, the folk who perform miracles daily. The community I grew up in certainly seeks to be seen in my poetry. Or at least reckoned with in some way. I lived in a place where I could feel entirely safe one minute because of all the grandmother and auntie figures who made sure I wasn't doing anything too "unladylike" while at the same time uncle figures were occasionally beating their wives and remarking on my growing breasts (when I reached adolescence) which made me feel utterly unsafe. That dichotomy, that tension, those dueling realities inform how I write for sure. 


How does a poem come to you? Is it a word, a thought, an image, a vision? Or something else?

 *I write every day. It feels...ancestral. Like falling in the dark and all of a sudden there are arms to hold me. I sit down and wait on the words. When the first line comes I usually don't know what it's telling me or where I will have to travel to locate the meaning but everything that follows the first line is about chasing down the meaning of it and trusting that my consciousness is working on my behalf.


Please let me say that, YES! You have a blaze of a trail! When did you get into stage presence and slam poetry?

* In 2011 after a good deal of kicking and screaming. I didn't want to participate in slam at all but elected to try after a childhood friend kept prodding me. I don't slam now. I was a National Poetry Slam Champion in 2011, Women of the World Slam Champion in 2012, National Underground Champion in 2013, also Southern Fried Champion in 2013, and after I won Women of the World for a second time in 2014, I got out before I became too cynical. I don't necessarily "need" performance. I do it and am pretty good at it but I don't need it. I do need to write though. No matter what.


Your words have deep resonance and poets do create revolution. When inspired and putting a poem together, what are your thoughts?

 *Say it all. Bleed if you have to. Don't die with these stories locked in your body. 


Can you give me one line that has sustained you throughout this hurricane of endless idiots? I could be more specific, but I’m sure that you know of whom I speak!

From my 8 year old: "Nobody is bigger than my beating heart. Not even a president." 


Who are some of those beings who have inspired you, whether poets, artists, musicians, family, friends?

 *My mother, Professor Jackie Benton. My children. My family of origin. My sister friend Rachel McKibbens. John Coltrane. Josephine Baker and Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. Luciano Pavarotti. Harry Belafonte. On and on.


Can you share one line that inspires you and keeps you moving forward?

 *"The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate the darkness, blaze roads through vast forests, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place. James Baldwin 






















































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*In the Book of Ezekiel 37:3, Ezekiel has a vision where he saw himself standing in a valley filled with the bones of many people. The bones had been there a long time. God asks Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” To which Ezekiel replied: “Lord God, you alone have the answer.”