Dominique Fishback on how she brought poetry to Judas And The Black Messiah

As Deborah, the soft-spoken and poetic love interest of Fred Hampton, Dominique Fishback brings indelible strength to Judas And The Black Messiah. She also carries one of the film’s biggest internal struggles, as she discovers she’s pregnant with the soon-to-be Fred Hampton Jr. as the unreachable Hampton Sr. struggles in jail. When Hampton is released and finds out, Deborah reads him a poem she’s written about becoming a mother in an uncertain world—a piece that was actually written by Fishback, who spent months journaling as her Judas character. The A.V. Club talked to her about that poem, and about her real-life meeting with the woman now known as Akua Njeri.