Back in 2016, Bayou Magazine interviewed Jericho Brown, whose poetry had recently earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship. In that interview, he talked about what he hoped to accomplish during that fellowship. He said, “My goal is to write a book that knocks me off my ass and makes me rethink what a poem is and what it can do.”

And that’s just what he did. His book, The Tradition, went on to win the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Read the full Bayou interview here.