A week after the 2024 presidential election, Maggie Smith, award-winning writer, poet and author of Good Bones, started a note on her smartphone titled “My Own Project 2025.” It contained her list of intentions for the coming year and beyond, starting with “No self-abandonment.”
When Smith texted the list to her friend Saeed Jones, himself an award-winning poet and author, the pair soon realized that their casual conversation about Donald Trump’s reelection could evolve into something more: a blueprint for surviving an unprecedented era in American politics.
What emerged from their collaboration is The People’s Project: Poems, Essays, and Art for Looking Forward, a new anthology from 27 poets, writers and artists — or, as Jones described it in a recent Seven Days interview, “a community in book form.” Compiled over six weeks in January and February — lightning speed by publishing standards — the sleek and accessible volume offers a range of voices, perspectives and reflections on themes both contemporary and timeless, from parenting trans children to the historical absence of women leaders in fascist regimes.
Alexander Chee’s essay “Let’s All Stay Alive” recounts his family’s flight from what would become North Korea in the 1950s. Patricia Smith’s “Chile, I’m Not Playing With You! Look at It!” describes her mother’s use of a now-famous photo of Emmett Till to teach a young Black girl the proper response to a Southern white man. “Dead Emmett was lesson,” Smith writes. “This is what white people will do to you if you don’t act right.”
“It’s like a tool kit for the interior life of the activist.”
Saeed Jones
Smith, Jones and Chee will be at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington on Saturday, September 13, for a book reading and community forum. Smith, 48, and Jones, 39, spoke to Seven Days by video call from their homes in Ohio and Massachusetts, respectively.
In the introduction, you write, “Our past has become the very Present we desperately hoped we had outrun.” What do you mean by that?
SAEED JONES: I’ve been doing a lot of archival research on another book I’m working on, so it’s really striking to read correspondences between Black women writers — June Jordan, Toni Cade Bombara, Toni Morrison — who are talking about the exact same things. A few months ago, during all the news about Iran, I was reading a June Jordan piece she wrote about Iran in the 1970s. At the time I was struck by how this all feels unprecedented and unfathomable to us. But honestly, “History is a series of strange loops,” as the writer Michael R. Jackson says. That’s part of the wisdom of this book. This is shocking and scary, but if we really dig deep and we look back, we can tap into that historical consistency.
How did you select your contributors?
MAGGIE SMITH: We started by thinking: Who are the people we have access to and are close to in our own lives? Who else would I want to get a call or voice memo or text or piece of work from right now because I think they can offer me something in this moment that I desperately need? The challenge was, I could think of a lot of people, but we wanted to keep this book slim. So it became a conversation about who is coming to our literary dinner party.
What prompts did you give them?
SJ: Initially, Maggie and I were texting a lot about Project 2025, so that’s where it all started. But Jenny [Xu, senior editor at Washington Square Press] said, “Let’s go bigger. We don’t want this to be a book that, a year from now, doesn’t feel relevant.” I think we accomplished our goal. You’ll be able to read these essays 50 years from now. So one prompt was, “What is some wisdom from your family or your ancestors that you feel would be useful to share?”
Before reading it, I assumed the book would be a practical guide to resisting Trump 2.0, sort of an Anarchist Cookbook for the age of ICE raids. But it reads more like a personal survival guide.
MS: It is a personal survival guide. Art, in its own way, is a practical way to survive trouble — and to make good trouble.
SJ: I was happy when I realized how slim the book is. I love slim books that you can just tuck in your back pocket and walk around with. I envision someone on their way to a protest. They’re on the subway or the bus, they’re alone, and their hands are shaking because it’s their first time going to a protest. I remember going to my first protest, which was Occupy Wall Street. I had to work up the nerve to go by myself. Wouldn’t it be nice to be like, “We’re doing this!” and then read Sam Sax’s poem [“Performance Scores for the Endings and Beginnings of Worlds”]? It’s like a tool kit for the interior life of the activist.
Maggie, what else did you have on your original Project 2025 list?
MS: It began with “No self-abandonment,” but the rest of the list got more specific to my personal life and the way I manage relationships with people who think and vote differently from me in my family and community. But the first item was the big umbrella, and everything else fell underneath it. Once you allow yourself to not be estranged from your own values, once you decide that you’re not going to negotiate any of that with people in your life, regardless of what role they play, everything else sort of falls into place.
SJ: I think about Maggie’s piece in which she writes, “We will not disappear ourselves, the way we will not allow others to be disappeared.” It’s intense, but it’s clarifying.
SD: It was chilling to read those words knowing that they were written before people started disappearing.
MS: And now they are. Despite the fact that I don’t have unilateral power to not allow ICE to kidnap people off the street, we don’t have to pretend it’s not happening. Another way of allowing people to be disappeared is to stay quiet.
SJ: Just yesterday, I was reading about firefighters who were dealing with a wildfire in California getting picked up by ICE in the middle of doing their work. They’re literally putting out a fire! They’re saving us!
MS: It’s not even a metaphor. It’s a literal fire.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
The People’s Project book reading and community discussion, Saturday, September 13, 7 p.m., at First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington. $30. For tickets, visit phoenixbooks.biz.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Resistance Is Fertile | The People’s Project, a new anthology of essays, poetry and visual art, offers a practical guide to surviving fascism”
This article appears in Sep 10-16 2025.
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