Since meeting Michael Broder at 2013’s Rainbow Book Fair, we’ve become friends and I’m delighted to have him on the podcast again. Since our last podcast, Michael launched the HIV Here & Now Project that includes a significant presence on Facebook. The Project combines poetry with HIV advocacy and serves as the platform for an upcoming anthology.
From the HIVHereandNow About Page:
The seed of this project was an LGBTQ reading I participated in during AWP 2015 in Minneapolis in April. Some of the poets, particularly the gay male poets, were reading poems about HIV or AIDS. Not poems about the beginnings of AIDS or the devastating havoc, personal and communal, wreaked by AIDS in the 1980s and 90s. But about HIV now, being HIV-positive, often for a long time, being on lifesaving meds, getting your life back, wondering what your life meant, what your past meant, your present, how to process having lived through that and living in this life now …

… And so the HIV Here & Now website was born to complement the HIV Here & Now anthology, and together they constitute the HIV Here & Now Project. The game plan is a moving target; that’s just how my mind words, for better or worse.