Author Spotlight: Daniella Toosie-Watson

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Oct 1
6 min read

Buy: What We Do with God by Daniella Toosie-Watson | Haymarket Books | Publication Date: September 09, 2025 | Pages: 80 | EAN/UPC: 9798888903704

What non-living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book?

Franz Kafka, for sure. His work’s impact on me is responsible for so much of What We Do with God.

Before anything literary/academic/bookish, reading Kafka at that young age gave me a methodology to contend with Christianity and everything that the faith mapped onto me and wanted to make of me. I was a teenager, a survivor; I was grieving and entrenched in the church—I used Kafka’s work to frame my understanding of my condition and to contend with the world around me, my experience with mental illness, and general day-to-day mundanities.

For What We Do with God, to honor the influence that class had on the book, I wrote “Questions after Reading Kafka in Eleventh Grade.” Beyond that poem, Kafka’s sensibilities offered different frameworks for approaching my book on the level of the poem and the broader questions of thematic scaffolding and tenor.

How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you?

When I was in middle school (I think I was age 12) I had a friend who was a very talented freestyle rapper. I asked him to teach me how to freestyle. He told me to try writing, first—that he’d look at it, and we’d go from there.

As I got a little older, I learned, “oh—this isn’t my lane, let me not appropriate this.” Nevertheless, that was my beginning: studying rap battles, different rappers/hip-hop artists and their approaches.

Can you talk about your use of form and theory?

The thinkers and frameworks I’ve tended toward over the years taught me how to achieve my favorite poetic move, that is, how to make associative leaps between seemingly disparate things in order to engender surprise, something with particularities that would not be achieved without that specific pairing.

I think my interest in this way of writing had to have started with my interest in freestyle rap—my early studies and attempts towards developing the agility and intellectual dexterity needed for freestyle rap informed the varying kinds of associative leaps you can see in my poems. Then, there came Kafka in 11^th grade. Then: Russian Formalism, defamiliarization, artists like Arthur Jafa. Actually, the associative approach to poetry is often how I go about my short poems—it’s how I am able to cover so much ground with so few lines, like in the prologue poem of What We Do with God, “The Bug” (where I also nod towards both associative poetry and folks who might disparage my use of it, and also where I let the reader in on what’s to come in the collection): “…is this a leap? / What did you expect? For me to let the bug / just be a bug.”

That I draft most of my poems via stream-of-conciousness is also informed by my history of loving freestyle rap as a form. Many of the poems in What We Do with God either are or started as stream-of-consciousness. For example, “God is DogSpelled Backward” is very much a stream-of-consciousness poem. I wrote it in one sitting and the revisions were mostly cosmetic. Maybe a word-swap here, a line-break there, but the conceptual unfolding and ordering of information—what you see on the page in the book, now, is how it was initially drafted.

When some folks talk about “stream-of-conciousness,” they sometimes refer to it as “word vomit” (a phrase I detest, btw). But, no—I refuse that naming entirely. Contrary to these kinds of categorizations, stream-of-conciousness takes training and study—a river runs, but the shape of the river and how it flows is all dependent on where and how the rocks, plants, etc are situated in the water. Study and training situate and resituate our writing and its respective processes.

My friend from college, Twayne Towns, is brilliant in both written and freestyle rap. Nothing about what he does is frivolous or accidental—its pointed, precise. Please do not mistake my use of “accidental” as my saying there is no room for play and experimentation—both are necessary, and for sure, accidents can lead to art-making. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about rejecting pretentiousness within and across a literary scope, and beyond a literary purview, any artistic framework that claims itself the codifier of what is or isn’t literary, what is or isn’t art. Folks, who, should turn the gaze back on themselves to examine their notions around skill, talent, and what’s worthy of study and attention. Folks who need to turn on the music video, open the book, listen to the song, go to the slam, go to the reading, the workshop, the classroom, the studio, the church service, that they might fill-in the gaps of their study, stop harming people, and, with any luck at all: shut up.

Who are your mentors? How did they help you shape your book?

Greg Pardlo and Vievee Francis—both of whom I worked with at the 2015 & 2016 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop—changed the trajectory of my life. Without their tutelage and care, I really don’t know what my life would look like right now.

If we’re talking about mentorship on the level of craft, though: Greg helped me, in his words, “develop of sense of narrative architecture to complement and frame [my] associative leaps.” I met Greg very early in my writing journey when my poetry was quite abstract. He helped me to not necessarily reel-in my imagination, but rather, to conceptualize what my imagination could do and become when it has a scaffolding or structure.

With Vievee, in terms of craft and method: under her tutelage I studied and practiced writing in various forms. What’s more, she gave us practical, employable guidance on how to examine our grief and come out on the other side of the writing, intact.

I have mentors in other ways, too. I consider the writers/thinkers/figures who I study but haven’t met to be mentors; and their work, my mentors. I consider songs that have taught me something about pacing and building tension to be mentors. I consider the relationship between an epigraph and a poem that introduces me to something new, to be a mentor. Mentorship doesn’t have to be from someone you know. For so many people for so many reasons, person-to-person mentorship isn’t accessible. Plus, this alternative kind of mentorship often feels (and is) safer.

How did writing this book transform you?

Writing What We Do with God transformed me in so many ways: taught me about longsuffering, patience, and consistency. Showed me that I believed in myself. I mean, if I didn’t believe in myself, I wouldn’t have kept writing with no clear ending—I wasn’t writing on a press’s deadline or anything. I was writing to make something I loved and was proud of, that I believed would be picked up when I was finished writing it. I wrote for 8 years without an expected end. Indeed, I became a person who is willing to wait.

I learned to love my writing. I’m not the self-loathing artist. I’ve worked and am working too hard to be self-deprecating. Folks can dislike my work if they want to—that’s fine, and also not my business (granted that the reason for not liking my work is aesthetic/stylistic/rooted in an “ism,” etc.—if the reason is that I’ve written something harmful, then that’s another conversation and is very much my business).

To be clear, I can and do acknowledge when something I create isn’t up-to-par with what I want for my work, but I read something that said, “you can’t hate yourself into a version you can love.” If a poem isn’t fully-developed, I am going to nurture it until it is. Nurturing a poem might look like using gentle language like “not fully-developed,” studying, reading, giving myself a break, taking a walk, looking at art that inspires me, revision, revision, revision. But what I won’t do is tell myself that my art is shit 1. Because it’s not 2. Because no. I don’t accept being spoken to that way, and by extension, I won’t treat my writing that way. Yes—I’ve dedicated myself to this work, will continue to dedicate myself to this work, and I refuse expectations of humility or playing-small or being-small.

What are you currently reading?

Gbenga Adesina, Death Does Not End at the Sea.

Daniella Toosie-Watson is a writer, visual artist, and the author of What We Do with God (Haymarket Books, 2025). Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Oxford Poetry, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her honors include the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize Shortlist, the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, and a Graduate Hopwood Award & Zell Fellowship from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where she received her MFA in poetry. Daniella lives in New York.