About Imani
I Create Worlds.
I’m Imani Sims, a poet, speculative artist, installation artist, and ritualist interested in what becomes possible when we let the imagination wander beyond the boundaries of the ordinary.
My work lives somewhere between poetry, Afrofuturism, speculative literature, tarot, installation, and community ritual.
I write about gods and ghosts. Black women who become something other than mortal. Queer futures. Death. Desire. Magic. Transformation. The universe. The things we inherit and the things we decide to become instead.
Sometimes those questions become poems.
Sometimes they become tarot cards, rooms, rituals, workshops, or entire worlds.
MY storyThe Strange Has Always Felt Like Home
Wonder has always been where I begin.
As a kid, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was my favorite story. I loved the idea of following curiosity somewhere unexpected—of slipping through an ordinary opening and discovering that the rules on the other side were entirely different.
I never really stopped looking for rabbit holes.
Science fiction gave me worlds beyond the one I knew. Mythology gave me gods who were messy, hungry, jealous, magical, and impossible. Poetry taught me that an entire universe could live inside a handful of lines.
And speculative literature gave me a question I keep returning to:
What if things could be different?
Wonder is my specialty because wonder asks us to imagine before we decide what is possible.
That question sits underneath much of my practice. I'm interested in the radical possibility of imagining Black people—particularly Black women and queer people—beyond the limits placed on us by the present.
Poetry Is Usually Where I Begin
I've been a performance poet for more than twenty years, and language remains at the center of nearly everything I make.
My writing has appeared in collections and publications including Adrienne, (A)live Heart, Unfettered Hexes, F(r)iction, SPOKE, Breadline, and Poetry on Buses.