A discussion with Irvin Hunt, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, Illinois. He writes on African American literature and political history with special emphasis on art, world-making, and their temporalities in the context of a racially fraught society. Our conversation is about his new book Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement, forthcoming in early April 2022 with University of North Carolina Press. Topics include what it means to write and think theoretically about activist figures, to embed theoretical figures in social and political history, and the stakes of thinking about Black life as in the present and not inextricably, irretrievably tied to the abject past nor to a future of hope.