Interview with Divya Victor, Judge of the 2026 Ekphrastic Poetry Prize

Interview with Divya Victor

by Sara Dudo

Sara Dudo: Thank you so much for agreeing to judge our 2026 Ekphrastic Poetry Prize! We’re so excited you’ll be selecting the finalists and wanted to offer a chance for Palette’s readers and writers to get to know you better. If you were to sit down and write an ekphrastic poem, what would your process be like? And how would it differ from your go-to writing process?

Divya Victor: Ekphrasis is foundational to my writing practice, not just in poetry and prose, but also in how I correspond with other writers and how I enter and sustain my relationships. I use art as a starting point to understand what I am thinking, feeling, desiring, or fleeing. It is a bridge I cross to reach into the lives of others, which is really where we live—in, with, beside, and even as others. I think of ekphrasis both at an early stage and (if you are writing for an audience) a further state of encounter. Ekphrasis is a starting point to understanding mutuality, human interdependence, and intersubjectivity. It is one face of interdisciplinarity—that gregarious method of being in your art while in someone else’s too. What you make might be a starting point for someone else, a new foundation. While we are still living within an economic system that wants us to celebrate the individual, ekphrasis is one way of countering that mandate and to celebrate what George Oppen described as “being numerous,” what Jean-Luc Nancy described as “being singular plural”—the truth that there is no “I” without a “we.” I think of ekphrasis as a practice of kinship, which (like other forms of kinship) can be fraught with love, violence, shame, revulsion, and complicated desire.

I arrive at an image, a musical composition, or a sculpture first as an amateur—as in, someone acting out (and acting out of) my love for something. I shower it with attention, document my interest, and confess my attraction, my apprehensions, and my fears. I suppose I kind of crush hard on it? I talk about it incessantly to others, miss it when I can’t see it or listen to it, bore my friends by describing it, asking them to interpret it. This early processing becomes notes, where I honor the emergent questions, the perplexing anxieties or insecurities about my experience with the artwork. I try to notice what I am tempted to avoid, try to cross out the trodden or habitual paths into the work.

Then, I become a student of the work, researching it, studying its making. I burrow into the artwork’s history and scamper through rabbit holes until I find a point of irresistible conjoinment, where my own subjectivity and the artwork are transformed by an expected rupture or mystery (Barthes might call this a punctum), where conjecture or speculation can be the only paths forward, and for which poetry (or lyric prose) can become one possible vehicle.

After this, I stop looking, listening, watching, consuming (that primary work) altogether. I then begin constructing the structure which lets me hold it within myself. This eventually becomes the poem. At this point, I become a kind of receiver taking dictation (perhaps as Jack Spicer might have imagined), listening within and keeping my finger on the pulse of the lines arriving, the images floating in, and making sure the artwork is alive within the work I am making.

Ekphrasis is simply a very fundamental phase of thought for me; it is how I begin almost anything. I am a slow processor, a fast composer, and a passionate, even extroverted revisor, both in poetry and prose. And the best part is, at the end of the process, there is always the affirmation that there is no end to a literary/art work. It is, at its core, an interminable entity moving between us, changing us, urging us to see and know differently.

Dudo: Most writers and readers are familiar with the famous, classic ekphrastic poems such as Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” What are some of your personal favorites of more modern ekphrastic books?

Victor: Recent favorites!

Sophie Calle’s True Stories is prose, but pithy and precise as some poems can be. It’s one of my favorite books because it allows whimsy, grief, deep feeling and trivial fixations to co-exist while sustaining the non sequitur as a generative approach to world-making.

Toby Altman’s newest book Jewel Box is a response to the art/design and architecture of the midwestern architect Louis Sullivan, and a confrontation of the claim of his “indigenous” American idiom within the colonial landscape.

Serena Chopra’s newest poetry collection A Catalog of Future Mercies works through family photographs, archival images of environmental change, and portraits of her grandmother to consider shame, forgiveness, familial trauma, and immigration.

Carolina Ebeid’s Hide considers the absences in the family archive for those who are multiply displaced. This is a book about kinship histories in Palestine and Cuba, moving to the rhythms set by Ana Mendieta, and develops what Fady Joudah has aptly called a heliotropic “cinepoetics.”

Dudo: What is some advice you can offer to writers on conducting research to find the right photographs, painting, sculpture, etc. to write about?

Victor: There are no “right” objects. Leave the idea of right and wrong behind or be content with making mediocre copies of poems you were once told to admire. Become ready to make error your teacher. Honor the missteps as much as you honor the successes in composition. Trust the double-take. Be open to the grand accidents that lead to an unexpected love. Distinguish between instinct and habit. Cultivate a generosity towards the minor note, the minor figure, the uncanonized, the insignificant, the forgotten, the ones who never “made it big.” Find your quiet love in the noise of the famous and notable.

Do not begin with yourself as a knowing/feeling agent—instead, follow Mahmoud Darwish’s advice: Think of others. The imposing, recurring, too-seductive barrier to making good work is choosing mere self-expression over curiosity about your medium—language—and what you’re aiming to discover, transform, and importantly, destroy. Choose your enemies diligently.

Do not elect yourself the voice of anyone, or anything. Destroy the hierarchy between high and low art. Invite the family archive into your own gallery of celebration, into your own investigative files. Wrestle with the questions for longer than you worship the answers. Consider critique as one worthy mode between the traditional options of odes, paeans, collages, elegies, confessions; consider that you may need to invent forms for your singular voice.

Lastly, cultivate a healthy distrust of anyone who claims that some objects rightfully belong to you, some to others. I don’t believe that we have a “given” right to write about anything or any rightful claim to exploiting any object as the subject of our work. Writing is a practice of earning that attention, of developing an aptitude for commenting on something. No identity confers an inherent expertise. Your style is how you negotiate becoming worthy of a reciprocal gaze. Your method is how you teach yourself to navigate that irreducible, illuminating distance between you and the object you write about.

Dudo: You were a 2023 PEN Affiliated Fellow at Civitella Ranieri, a collaborator on an Andrew Mellon Just Futures grant, a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.). Additionally, your work has been performed or installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, National Gallery Singapore, L.A.C.E., and the Museum of Modern Art. How do all these experiences inform your writing?

Victor: I am at home in archives, museums, galleries, and such spaces because after the initial policing of my behavior by security and staff, I am left to my own private deliberation. I also really like that I must use a pencil in these spaces, which returns me to the schoolroom and early practices of learning how to write. Being in residence at an archive or a gallery removes me from other disciplinary spaces—like the University—where I am sometimes seen as an expert or a teacher. This lets me engage as an amateur and a student. I make the best work when I am not worried about reproducing my own authority and when I am most committed to listening to the quiet doubts, and when I can palpate the soft uncertainties that lead to interesting, important questions that I can then pursue with vigor. The kinds of spaces/experiences you list above create these conditions for me.

Dudo: What is your next writing, poetry, or career-related goal?

Victor: I don’t have goals so much as I am constantly trying to learn what I desire, what I am willing to confront, which paradigm or framework I’m capable of challenging now. In the most simple way: my “career” is just well-sculpted evidence of the survival of my desire to know how to preserve a lively mind and our inherent dignity in a society hell bent on destroying both.

Dudo: What are you most excited to see in submissions for the 2026 Ekphrastic Poetry Prize?

Victor: Originality, daring deviation from prescriptions and received forms, engagements with minor figures, and propulsive, compelling arguments about poetry’s inextricable relationship with our political lives.

Learn more about the Ekphrastic Poetry Prize here