Interview with a Muse (IWAM) is a community for artists, culture bearers and visionaries.

Together, we use prompts, dialogue and inquiry to alchemize loneliness and despair into solidarity and world-making—in a time when curiosity itself is contraband.

Lead Artist, Maddy “MADlines” Clifford, is an Oakland-rooted writer, musician and organizer. Her mediums are words, sounds and ceremonies; her work explores themes of abolition, feminism and economic justice.

Maddy has a notable career highlighted by her eight-year tenure as a Poet in Residence at the San Francisco Juvenile Detention Center. Following this, Maddy released a short-form album titled downCHANTS and composed a forty-minute musical score for the aerial dance piece Apparatus of Repair in collaboration with Flyaway Productions.

She led a video podcast called What’s Pimpin’? - produced with KQED Arts and also served as Cultural Strategist in Government with the City of Oakland’s Environmental and Sustainability Department.

Maddy currently works as Creative Media Strategist with Debt Collective, the nation’s first union of debtors. She’s collaborated with More Perfect Union and appeared on Last Week Tonight; her written contributions can be found in Prism Reports and Teen Vogue.

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