This reading responds to The Phillips Collection exhibition Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, curated by Adrienne L. Childs. Terrance Hayes’s numerous volumes include American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Lighthead (National Book Award in Poetry), Wind in a Box (Pushcart Prize), and Muscular Music (Kate Tufts Discovery Award). To Float in the Space Between, his collection of texts and drawings inspired by the work of Etheridge Knight, has garnered the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award in Poetry Criticism. He has received many honors and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and in 2014, a MacArthur fellowship.