Lyrical, breathless, incisive, Diane Exavier’s THE MATH OF SAINT FELIX marks her as a rising star in the next generation of Black poetics, showing us the ways Black femmehood carries and rebuilds language—and the world.

– Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism

This book-length lyric is an attempt to do the math of a woman, of a family, of a country, of a diaspora. The sum of one life reveals the permutations of many: daughters, sisters, lovers. The cost of one death is uncountable.

Dispatching from the Caribbean Diaspora, Diane Exavier is a writer, theatermaker and educator working at the intersection of performance and poetry. Diane concerns herself with what she recognizes as the 4 L’s: love, loss, legacy and land. She is author of Teaches of Peaches published by TAR Chapbook Series in 2017, and her writing can be found elsewhere in such places as The Atlas Review and The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. A 2021 Jerome Foundation Finalist, Diane holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from Brown University. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Desiree C. Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press), 2021 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry and winner of the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O'clock Press, 2016) and has short stories and poems published in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, the Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. Desiree is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, New York. She lives in Providence, RI.

The Math of St. Felix | Diane Exavier in conversation with Desiree C. Bailey