Dr. Brenda Greene interviews poet, fiction writer, professor, and literary activist James E. Cherry. Greene and Cherry discuss the themes in Cherry’s poetry book, Between Chance and Mercy, the writers from the Black Arts Movement who have influenced him, his writing craft and teaching, and his book Edge of the Wind (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022), a novel about a community and how it reckons with the nightmare of racial injustice. Cherry’s writing has been published in journals and anthologies both in the U.S. and internationally.