For the fifth episode of Sounds of Erasure, Mahshid Mayar and Sandra Tausel welcome Crystal Simone Smith. The award-winning poet, scholar, and educator is the author of Down to Earth: Poems (2020), Dark Testaments: Blackout Poems (2023), and Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (2025). In this episode, we will discuss her newes Common Sense (1776), Addressed to Today’s Citizens of America: An Erasure (2026, Beacon Press) and what and whom erasure renders visible during the year of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Erasure
Poetry
Project
by Mahshid Mayar, PhD funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)