It's Friday, with its typical evening frenzy.

So, I try to give it sort of a cultural touch by attending a so-called webinar which pretty much consists of an online poetry reading session in this case.

One of the performers is a poet by the name of Taylor Johnson who reads excerpts from a recently published book and answers questions coming from the online audience.

Something in Taylor Johnson's poetry appeals to me for whatever reason.

And so, a couple of weeks later, I decide to reach out and ask for an interview.

The use of pronouns on Taylor Johnson's website makes their identity as a transgender poet clear. But, other than that, the poetry I check out is pretty comprehensive and conjures up travel images, almost like poetic postcards.

And so, months after the online reading session, Taylor and I are in touch and set up a schedule for an online conversation.

And it will be a wonderful experience and exchange of enlightened thoughts, ideas, and stories, with no room for issues and identities as topics. In addition to that, I'm proud to conclude that Taylor Johnson and I end the conversation as friends.

And the chat itself is a journey, quite literally speaking. Taylor Johnson is sitting in a car using a friend's smartphone to connect, while they are driving to a small town in rural Minnesota.

So, I make sure to include the road trip in our online conversation. We use our respective webcams only at the very beginning of the recording and quickly switch to audio to reduce battery consumption and to make the talk more convenient and comfortable for all of us, in different parts of the world.

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So, the following narrative includes excerpts from a collection of testimonies and interviews entitled “Let's Talk About It Anywhere In The World...”, where it is all about people's voices, accents and speech patterns, hand in hand with my own personal anecdotes and observations. In addition to that, people are allowed to introduce themselves in their respective, often indigenous, languages and dialects, and to speak their minds freely, without any paraphrases or expectations.

So, let the story go on from there...

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Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC.

They are the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.

His work appears in The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere.

Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary.

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https://www.taylorjohnsonpoems.com/

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At the moment, Radio Aula Mundi is an evolving podcast station where no language and all languages are spoken… 

It’s a multilingual mix of music, poetry, lectures, languages, interviews, documentaries, recipes, and a lot more, co-produced with the students of the ‘Aula Mundi International Cultural Center’…

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