Throughout April, we’ve been telling stories that coincide with the census — the one time every decade everyone in the U.S. is asked to think about their racial identity—whether they like it or not. And in each of our episodes, we’ve led with a question: Who counts in 2020?
For our final episode in the series, we asked this question to some of our favorite artist-philosophers of society: poets. After all, April is National Poetry Month, and we wanted to bring you some beautiful (and challenging) words to sink into and savor. We talked to poets of color about who we are and who counts in 2020. Danez Smith, Franny Choi, Kaveh Akbar, Natalie Diaz, and Jesús Ivan Valles each read us a poem and told us what it means, for them, to count and be counted.