Collaborators’ Q&A For the Switcheroo, Broadsided artists were invited to submit visual work that writers might respond to. We then asked Regin Igloria, the 2025 Switcheroo artist, to choose a piece he thought would be generative for writers and would work in Broadsided’s unique format. He selected Daniel Esquivia Zapata’s mixed-media piece, Word-works 1868-2022. Of his choice, Regin had this to say: Daniel’s work immediately stood out to me, particularly because of the combination of …
Collaborators’ Q&A: Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: I aimed to connect the concept of growth with moments of feeling out of place, balanced by a sense of security and rootedness that can be expressed through our hair. This movement through space represents a risk and a dare. Poet Amílcar Peter Sanatan: I write about my experiences moving between Europe and the Caribbean…. I am the flâneur. I am the Flâneur Noir in Nordic Europe, making sense of place and my personhood across white spaces. At the same time, this process is happening in the other direction; people are making sense of me in their place, their understandings of it, and their identities.
Poet Amílcar Peter Sanatan is an interdisciplinary Caribbean artist, educator and activist. He is from Trinidad and Tobago and currently works in Helsinki, Finland. Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata is an Afro-Colombian artist and educator. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Auburn University, specializing in drawing.
Collaborators’ Q&A: How did this image come to be? Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: I have been working on drawings of dandelions…I also wanted to keep it simple, like wanting to dance with someone, you don’t step into their place and take over, you just try to match their rhythm and continue their movements with yours, I look at it like being more guided by the poem. What did you think an artist would pick up on from your poem? Does the artist’s response make you see the poem differently? Poet Geffrey Davis: I’d hoped that the artist would pick up on the wind in the poem….His image brought back so many childhood memories of trying to blow a flower head clean in a single breath—which I’d been told could make your wishes come true. Daniel’s response has made me see how that forgotten ritual of hope was still somehow informing the poem.
Poet Geffrey Davis’s books include One Wild Word Away, Night Angler,and Revising the Storm. A recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts, he teaches with the University of Arkansas’s Program in Creative Writing & Translation. Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata is an Afro-Colombian artist and educator born in San Jacinto, Bolivar, Colombia. Daniel recently moved from Bogotá, Colombia to Alabama to teach and exhibit from his new home in the US South.
