Saida Agostini is Torch literary Arts Featured Artist of July

Your writing is rich with images of desire and love but also leans into the realities of pain and injustice. How do these subjects influence your work?

Our bodies were built for pleasure. What a miracle of atoms. I think one of the prevailing tragedies of misogynoir and capitalism is that we as Black folks are constantly pushed to be divorced from our physicality and pleasure. Audre Lorde defines the erotic as a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. We have a right to our etiology, our chaos, our power. I want us to know the full scope of our power, and the history of it, what it took, what it continues to take to survive this beast called America. My work seeks to recount these histories, and offer a full-throated vision of Black freedom where our pleasure is never denied.