AR: What’s something your students have taught you?

SS: I learn a lot from seeing what my students endure. I teach a bottom feeder CUNY and I have a lot of immigrant students and working class students. Being queer on Staten Island is the definition of hell. I have a student, working-class kid, Palestinian, queer, who was going to school by working at Walgreens and when I look at the spoiled bratty children of my friends who went to fancy schools and are living off their parents and don’t want to do anything because every job is below them, it just kills me. My students are really inspiring. If I wasn’t going to work with poor or immigrant kids everyday I would have no clue what their lives are like, ‘cause none of my friends do. So, it’s very enriching for me.

AR: You’re not teaching MFA students, but as a writing teacher, what do you think of them?

SS: I send very few students to MFA programs. I don’t really believe in them, but I think if you’re exceptionally talented and you’re poor, you have to get one. You can’t get into the system without one. But, then, I’ve been appalled at how those have been treated.

AR: Did you get an MFA?

SS: I went for one day. So, no, I didn’t get one.

AR: What happened?

SS: I’d never heard of an MFA. I dropped out of college and I started writing books and I’d published two when I took a job waitressing at the first coffee shop in Tribeca. Tribeca was just gentrifying. I was waiting on all of these artists who started telling me to go get an MFA.