Oluwaseun Olayiwola, author of "Strange Beach"

Today, I’ve got an absolute treat for you: I sat down with Oluwaseun Olayiwola—poet, choreographer, and all-around creative powerhouse—to talk about his latest collection of poems, Strange Beach. Oluwaseun is one of those rare artists who moves seamlessly between the page and the stage. As a choreographer, his work has graced performance spaces from London to Paris, and as a poet, he’s got a voice that feels like it’s bending language in real time. His collection Strange Beach grapples with Blackness, queerness, intimacy, migration—all through a lens that feels at once deeply personal and intellectually expansive. It’s like standing at the shore of something vast, something shifting, something you can’t quite pin down but can absolutely feel. In our conversation, we get into the themes of the book, the connections between dance and poetry, and what it means to make art that moves—literally and figuratively. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and follow me on Instagram (@litwithcharles) to keep the literary conversations going. Let’s get more people listening—and reading!