Sometimes, where you’re from is who you are, even when it’s time to leave: An Interview with P. Scott Cunningham
by Travis Cohen Acosta
P. Scott Cunningham is a South Florida poet and the founder of O, Miami, which started as a poetry festival in April of 2008 and has grown into a cultural institution that’s helped define Miami’s literary landscape for the last two decades. Cunningham’s newest collection, Self-Portrait as the “i” in Florida (Autumn House Press) is, in many ways, a love letter to his home—published after he and his family’s recent move to Chicago. Cunningham spoke to Prairie Schooner’s own Miami transplant and assistant fiction editor, Travis Cohen Acosta, about his new book, his new surroundings, and how Miami will always be home.
Self-Portrait as the “i” in Florida by P. Scott Cunningham, published April 7, 2026 by Autumn House Press
Travis Cohen Acosta: I want to start with how this book started. I was already familiar with a good handful of these poems, ones that have been out in the world since before the book, ones that came into the world while you were still living in Miami. And now that this book is coming out after you’ve moved away from home, those poems, and the collection as a whole, feel like they take on a new layer of meaning. I’m curious when this book started to take shape in your head and how that shape might have changed for you as you and the family started contemplating a move from the Southlands to the Midwest?
P. Scott Cunningham: One of the origins is Midwestern, actually. I’d been reading the series of poems Nate Marshall has written about Harold’s Chicken locations in Chicago, and I was thinking, Why haven’t I written odes to any of the places in Miami I love? One of my frustrations with much of the writing about Miami is that it tends to be so generic in nature, when the place itself, as you well know, is incredibly varied and very much unlike itself from one neighborhood to another. West Kendall isn’t Little Haiti isn’t Brickell isn’t North Beach, etc. But it does feel sometimes as if we (and I include myself in this) have swallowed the county’s marketing messaging and are spitting it back, if not in content, then at least in form, and I wanted to avoid that mode of speech. And then I heard the Miami poet Arsimmer McCoy read her poem about the 163rd St flea market, and I realized she’d already been doing what I’d been wanting to do. So I copied Nate and Arsimmer and started writing about places in Miami that were too specific to generalize about. That’s why some of the poems are tagged with an address. But of course, when you talk about your home, it’s impossible to completely avoid conceiving of it as an entire place, so I’ve done that, too, but my hope is that when I’ve made pronouncements about Miami, they are in service of complicating or interrogating my own view of it. So, to finally answer your question, I started writing “Miami” poems seriously around 2019, long before I knew I was going to be moving out of Miami.
TCA: A lot of the poems in this collection work with the litany, so that part of the portrait you’re making, from “Ode to Children Raised on Florida Tap Water” all the way to “Florida Prayer” (two of my favorites in the collection) feels like it functions as a running catalogue of the things that make us and make this place. The very granular pieces of Floridians and Florida and Floridiana. Did it feel like you were collecting pieces of Florida for this book or were the pieces just parts of Florida you carried with you or maybe a little bit of both?
PSC: Both. I was conscious of trying to name the things that feel like South Florida to me—canals, Chattahoochee, mangroves, etc.—but also, writing about a place you know very well dredges up things you weren’t expecting. I grew up in Boca Raton, which is not Miami, and that particular vantage point is important to me. Boca and Miami are part of the same swamp, so there’s a shared ecological vocabulary, but culturally, they’re very different, which means, in addressing both, I just had more sources for my litanies. Ultimately, I think there are two locales explored in the book: my childhood in Boca, a.k.a. becoming a person, and my young adulthood in Miami, a.k.a. becoming a poet. I tried to document both as “home” to me, which meant naming all of these specific things that demarcate those places, but mostly, the choices were spontaneous and not planned out ahead of time. I knew that I wanted to write about a specific mango tree or laundromat, for instance, but I didn’t know what would come out when I did.
TCA: The book doesn’t just offer its portrait in the form of a catalogue of Florida stuff, it also offers it in the form of a question, sometimes asked implicitly, sometimes explicitly: What does it mean to be Floridian—as person, as object, as moment? I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about this and the answers change, especially the more I write toward the question. I’m curious how the answers changed for you in the writing here.
PSC: I think you’ve named the big question in the book, but when I started writing, it was less of a question and more of an assertion. I felt like I was speaking to people outside of Florida and Miami who don’t understand these places, in order to say, “Where I’m from is beautiful, and here’s why.” But then as soon as I made the decision to leave, which I think I knew in the poems before I knew it anywhere else, the statement became a question, which also meant that I was now talking to myself, and I had a real emotional crisis. From one day to the next, I began thinking: If I leave Miami, who am I, both as a person and an artist? And that terrified me. I literally have a tattoo on my arm that reads, “I will die in Miami in the sun.” Everything I’ve done creatively since I was about 27 has been about that city. If I abandon it, I thought, am I also abandoning my art? Many of the poems in the book arrived inside of that crisis, and I think (I hope) you can hear that in them. But then I heard the Miami novelist Jennine Capó Crucet speak on a panel about Florida writing, and she talked about writing about the city from a position of geographical remove, and the way she spoke about it made me realize that I couldn’t remove Florida and Miami from my body even if I tried. I was baked there, first as a child, and later as a writer. It’s who I am, for better or worse. Moreover, I realized that the way I’m a Miamian is different from the way, for instance, that Jennine is a Miamian or you, Travis, are a Miamian, and those differences are good and interesting. In my opinion, the city needs as many different versions of itself as we can document. Miami should be considered one of the great literary cities in the world, and the more of us who write about it, the more that will become evident to the rest of the world, in the way that it is obviously evident to you and me.
TCA: There are a few poems, like “Free Jazz” and “Dean’s Gold,” where I am reminded that you came into the MFA at FIU as a prose writer before Campbell McGrath, as he takes credit for it, converted you into a poet. It feels like you gave yourself more permissions to lean into the prose-y parts of your voice here than in Ya Te Veo, and I wanted to ask two questions about this. First, do you think that prose-y voice is a product of this collection specifically, or does it feel like a permission you’ve taken progressively between that book and this one? And in either case, can you speak to any other permissions you’ve noticed yourself taking that have moved you from the author of Ya Te Veo to the author of Self-Portrait as the “i” in Florida?
PSC: Just to confirm, yes, Campbell did make me a poet. That’s an indisputable fact. And I’m so happy you noticed that aspect of the book. It wasn’t exactly a conscious choice. Since about 2015, I’ve been writing a book of essays about Miami (which comes out next year), and inside of that period where I was working on both projects, I realized that some of the essays were poems, and some of the poems were essays. So there’s been a little bit of horse trading between the projects. But also, early on in the writing of this book (post Ya Te Veo) I came up with a new formulation for my poetics in which I divide every single poem into one of three categories—anthem, monologue, or observation—and I wanted to have an even number of each type in the manuscript. The anthems are typically the short, rhymed poems, like “Landing: MIA,” and I think of them like little songs or emotional outbursts. The monologues are the prose-y ones you’ve mentioned, where I’m in a mode where I’m talking to a single person, and I want the voice to sound like conversational speech. Then, finally, the observations are the ones in which I’m trying to bear witness, not in a courtroom sense but just as a person in the world, to situate myself as one object among many. A good example is “A Capsized Yacht in Biscayne Bay” or any of the mango tree poems, in which I think I’m trying to say that my body, in the overall scheme of things, is no more or less valuable than a tree. Probably less, actually, since I have produced in my lifetime zero mangos.
TCA: There are two running portraits here, that of the state and that of the self, and sometimes they feel inseparably intertwined, like in “Ode to Traffic” and “Self-Portrait as the ‘Flor’ in Florida,” while others feel more like they hone in on one or the other, say “Map of Florida,” which feels more focused on the portrait of place, followed right away by “Shuckers Bar & Grill” (RIP), which feels like the emphasis is on the portrait of person. How did you go about striking the balance between looking out and looking in that you found with this collection?
PSC: To complicate the formal divisions of anthem/monologue/observation I just laid out, obviously, these forms bleed into one another. “Ode to Traffic,” for example, exists somewhere between monologue and observation. It’s something I really witnessed—a bunch of Lamborghinis blocking a highway for a photoshoot—but I can’t really contain my excitement in the beautiful absurdity of that situation, so I start to monologue about it, and then the end is starting to move into anthemic territory because it is, in the end, an ode to beauty. I always go into a poem with a plan, but then the poem has other ideas. Have you heard that Joe Louis quote about boxing, “Everyone has a plan until they get hit?” It’s kind of like that. If boxing is about the relation of two bodies in oppositional space, poetry, for me, is about where and how a person is situated in the world. So in “Map of Florida” I’m literally just trying to describe the actual shape of Florida via metaphors until I ran out of gas. It’s observational, but of course, the images are personal. “Shuckers” started as a persona poem in the voice of Amy Winehouse, who got married in Miami, a fun fact that I’m perhaps overly delighted by. But as soon as I started writing, I almost immediately veered from the facts—she did not get married at Shuckers and I don’t think she ever ate there either—so the poem became personal very quickly. I’m the one who loves Shuckers (RIP indeed), not her. It’s actually one of the oldest poems in the book, and I sent it out to literary journals for years with Winehouse’s name in the title and it never got taken because editors (correctly) deduced that the poem wasn’t about Amy Winehouse at all, throwing the whole thing out of wack. Finally, I accepted that the poem had nothing to do with her, and I took her out of it. Literally the next time I sent it out, it was picked up. So you asked about finding that balance between looking out and looking in, but it’s really the poem itself that finds that balance. For me personally as a poet, I find that I’m a better writer if I begin from a place of looking out. The looking in happens either way, but unless there’s some sort of external stimulus, my poems can get solipsistic pretty fast.
TCA: Reading this made me think of my own Florida displacement, being in Nebraska, so far removed from Miami and looking at that as a four- or five-year endeavor. There is something longing about life in Miami, but that longing changes when you leave; the relationship to the place changes, deepens, and I think it changes the way you write about it, or at the very least it changes the way you want to write about it. For me it feels like one part remembering connection, one part proving it, one part keeping what you can. I’m curious how that changing relationship to home and writing about it has changed for you?
PSC: This question and the next one are two parts of the same inquiry, I think, and I’ll answer them in two parts, but they’re really one answer. I think you’re right about Miami being a place of longing, and I think that’s because Miami leaves itself much quicker than other cities. Developers are by far the most powerful people in the city, and what do developers do? They terraform. They tear things down and build new ones. So the Miami we love is always leaving us at a rate that’s much quicker than in other places. Living there means existing in a time lapse video of the city you love being demolished and remade. There’s an urgency to being there, in that the places you love may not be there in the morning, and I think it creates a kind of melancholy in its residents. To love Miami is to embrace a kind of grief as a way of living, which is not to say that Miamians are sad. Rather the opposite. I think Miamians are joyful because they don’t have any misconceptions about their city’s ephemerality. They know the places they love are doomed, and they love them harder because of it. The Miamians doing great writing about the city right now, people like Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, Francess Archer Dunbar, Arsimmer McCoy, Carlos Frías, Nadege Green, Carmen Pelaez, Isabella Marie Garcia, and Caridad Moro-Gronlier (and there are so many more), share a preoccupation with documenting what’s beautiful about their city because they know that their documentation, sooner rather than later, will be all that’s left. But also, their documentation has the power to reshape how the city sees itself. There’s a hope in their writing that it doesn’t have to be like this; we don’t have to tear it all down all the time. And that’s a kind of longing, too—for a Miami that protects and preserves its own people and what they love. Why do you, the developers, get to decide what Miami is, they’re saying, when we’re the ones who actually love this place and its history?
TCA: Another one of my favorites in the collection is “Landing, Miami International Airport.” First of all: bars. Second, there is something so potent and so powerful about the return to Miami. It’s true when you live there and you’re just coming back from a little spell away, and it’s true when you have to leave for real, when you live somewhere that isn’t Miami and get to come back and for everything that’s changed, Miami is still Miami, still loud with humidity, still welcoming you with all that aggressive familiarity. I don’t know that the return is as meaningful to any place as it is to Miami. Why do you think that is?
PSC: I’m so grateful you singled out this poem. It’s probably my favorite poem in the book, and I’m very afraid no one else is going to like it. The smell that hits you when walking off the plane and into the jetway in Miami is so unique. It’s humidity, yes, but it’s more than that, too, and it punches me right in the face every time. It’s always felt like re-entering my own body, and I wanted to write an ode to that feeling. When you’re born inside of that soup, it’s always going to feel different from any other kind of homecoming. That’s the smell you belong to. It’s ours, and it’s deserving of praise. No matter how many things they change about Florida, it will still smell like that, which means it will still be ours. I think it’s important that we, as artists, keep claiming the places we love, keep setting the terms by which they’re defined, as a defense against them being stolen.
TCA: As a Miamian, I can say definitively that the love here comes through clearly, but I think it’s going to come through for a lot of people who aren’t from Miami, too. Your love here is so big and so clear that it invites people to join you in loving the place, to get to know it better, to appreciate it more fully, whether they know it or they don’t. There is a pantheon for this sort of thing. I think of Campbell’s [McGrath] Spring Comes to Chicago, Kwame Dawes’ Nebraska, and Natalie Scenter-Zapico’s The Verging Cities. I think of authors who not only render a place but also their connection to it so vividly that I end up feeling like they’ve shown me something very intimate and very earnest about both place and poet. And in that way, this collection becomes a gift of portable Florida sun that you give the reader to take with them, and an indelible mark that binds you all the more to that place you love so well. I don’t really have a question for you here, but these are flowers you deserve to be given.
PSC: I’m so happy reading this because I’m definitely trying to give something back to a place that nurtured me. No one person can define a place. I just want to add something to the chorus about Miami, and I very much wanted to write a book that wouldn’t look out of place next to other place-based collections. You’ve named some pretty huge books, and Natalie is one of my favorite poets. Campbell, because he was (is) my teacher, is especially a lodestar though, particularly Spring Comes to Chicago and Florida Poems. I’m also very much in love with Wanda Coleman’s poems about L.A.; Gwendolyn Brooks’s poems about Chicago; and, of course, Donald Justice’s poems about Miami. I also found myself constantly re-reading a few place-based poems I love: Bruce Snider’s “Map”; Frank Báez’s “The End of the World Arrived in My Neighborhood”; and Quan Barry’s “Doug Flutie’s 1984 Orange Bowl Hail Mary as Water into Fire.” And, actually, the first poem I ever memorized, in high school, was Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” which, to me, is an ode to a specific place more than it is a love poem. I love when a poet declares: this block/neighborhood/city is enough for me. I don’t need anywhere else. And in a world in which powerful forces are trying to make everywhere look and feel the same, it’s a meaningful position to stake out.
TCA: I think there’s something affirming about getting to have this come into the world now, when you’re living in Chicago instead of Miami. You’ve said this to me and I’ve said it to you, but it’s strange thinking of a Miami without you in it or picturing you living anywhere but Miami. As far as publishing timing goes, though, that feels really special, like you have written another link of the chain the connects you and Florida forever into being, one that is beautifully and undeniably Miami. Circling back to the question about when this book started, I wanted to finish by asking how you feel about the way it ended up, in terms of where you are in the world as this book is coming out, as well as its connection to the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, a poet who I know means so much to you and who feels perfectly suited for a book that feels like a love letter sent to Florida from afar.
PSC: Justice was born and raised in Miami, but after his early twenties, he never lived there again. Most of his best poems about Miami were written later in his life, which I think is evidence that the places that make you continue to make you long after you’ve left them. As you know, I have a line of Justice’s tattooed to my body. He’s hugely important to me. To win a prize named after him (thank you West Chester and Major Jackson!) was better than winning a Nobel or a Pulitzer or whatever. I truly mean that. And for it to be this book? It all felt so right. I worked extremely hard on the poems, and I’m thrilled they’re out of my hands, and surrounded by art created by two Miamians (Gabriel Alcala, who did the illustration, and Mike del Marmol, who did the design), and produced by such a great press (Autumn House), and of course, I’m anxious because I want other people to love it as much as I do. But the aftermath does feel different from my first book. It took me a decade to get Ya Te Veo published, and there were a lot of very low moments. I got very frustrated, and I wanted to quit, so when it finally came out, I kind of stopped writing for a year, at least in the same way I’d been writing, and I don’t have that same desire to take a breath now. I’m much more at peace with my process being at the center of my life as a writer (and by process, I mean not only reading and writing, but also the friends and community I’ve build around that, the people I share my journey with) so the product doesn’t carry that same metaphorical weight of defining who I am. Writing, reading, and sharing is something I do every day, and a book is just one part of that, a wonderful, significant part of that, sure, but if I never published another book I would not feel like less of a writer. I could not say that the day Ya Te Veo came out. But then there’s the geographic aspect of your question, which is seeing this book out in the world while I’m occasionally shoveling snow. And that’s all joy. It feels like I built a bridge back to my home through the book, and that makes me incredibly happy.
TCA: The last thing I wanted to say is thank you, again and again, for making such a beautiful book. It does our home justice and makes me feel closer to it. It’s kept me warm out here in the Plains. From one Florida boy to another, thank you.
PSC: That means a lot to me, and getting to have this conversation with you means a lot to me because we’re going through this experience together: of missing Miami and trying to process that missing. Obviously, I’m excited for anyone to engage with the book, but I wrote it first and foremost to have a conversation with my friends, like you, who love Miami. So thanks for doing that with me, and thank you especially for your friendship.
P. Scott Cunningham is the author of Self-Portrait as the “i” in Florida (Autumn House, 2026), winner of the 2025 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas, 2018), selected for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Born and raised in South Florida, he is the founder of the O, Miami Poetry Festival and lives with his family in Illinois.
Travis Cohen Acosta is a Cuban American author and poet born and raised in Miami, Florida. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Florida International University and is currently a Ph.D student in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he serves as Assistant Fiction Editor at Prairie Schooner. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Permafrost, The South Dakota Review, Action, Spectacle, and The Sonora Review, among other publications.