Featured Bloggers
Every quarter, Harriet Books invites several poets to blog on a theme related to contemporary poetry and poetics. The theme for Fall 2023 is “Poetic Lineages.”
Featured Bloggers
-
-
Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for...
-
A. Van Jordan is the author of five collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005...
-
Vi Khi Nao is part of the collective She Who Has No Master(s). Her books include A Bell Curve Is a Pregnant Straight Line (11:11 Press, 2021), Sheep Machine (Black...
-
-
Featured BloggerBy A. Van Jordan November 27, 2023
In February of 1997, I exchanged letters with the poet and scholar Agha Shahid Ali. He was my teacher and “supervisor,” at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College,...
-
Featured BloggerBy Vi Khi Nao November 13, 2023
Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a three-part essay. Read Part I here. I want to note the intriguing similarity between the Vietnamese word “nhà thơ” for poet and “nhà thờ”...
All Posts
-
Featured BloggerBy A. Van Jordan November 27, 2023
In February of 1997, I exchanged letters with the poet and scholar Agha Shahid Ali. He was my teacher and “supervisor,” at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College,...
-
Featured BloggerBy Vi Khi Nao November 13, 2023
Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a three-part essay. Read Part I here. I want to note the intriguing similarity between the Vietnamese word “nhà thơ” for poet and “nhà thờ”...
-
Featured BloggerBy A. Van Jordan October 30, 2023
Saturday… late morning, damn-near noon, and I’m thinking about influences, role models, and what I admire in the work they do. As I get older, I’ve come to admire discipline,...
-
Featured BloggerBy Vi Khi Nao October 23, 2023
There are two epochic impulses (in song and poetic compositions) that classically and elliptically shape, silhouette, and direct the inventive vector of my creative and (literary) life. The pre-war music,...
-
Featured BloggerBy Safia Elhillo October 9, 2023
I was in Sudan this past February, on a boat in Sabaloga, cutting through the Nile and the early morning mist, blissfully unaware of the war that would take so...
-
Featured BloggerBy Aisha Sasha John September 25, 2023
I am funny. Sometimes I am funny. Sometimes parts of my poems are funny. I understand this as a function of God’s love for me: a gift, this instinct, an...
-
Featured BloggerBy Chen Chen September 18, 2023
Good humor is hot, and funny people are often incredibly hot. I think this is something the poet Justin Chin understood. Consider his poem “Lick My Butt,” one of the hottest and funniest poems...
-
Featured BloggerBy Andrea Cohen September 4, 2023
Late July, on a hilltop in Umbria. I’ve carried a desk from one room to another in this 12th century tower to think about humor and poetry. And instead, I sit...
-
Featured BloggerBy Aisha Sasha John August 28, 2023
In May I got to experience poet and legend Ariana Reines read in person for the first time. Ariana is very alive. The story she told to introduce her poems...
-
Featured BloggerBy Chen Chen August 14, 2023
Nearly everything I know about football can be summed up in two profoundly funny and funnily profound poems by Mary Ruefle “Elegy for a Game” and “Super Bowl.” Though neither explicitly mentions it, these poems...
Previous Bloggers
-
-
Poet, choreographer, and performer Aisha Sasha John is the author of I have to live (McClelland & Stewart 2017), finalist for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize; THOU (Book*hug, 2014), finalist for the 2015 Trillium Book...
-
Andrea Cohen is the author of eight poetry collections, including The Sorrow Apartments (Four Way Books, 2024), Everything (Four Way Books, 2021), Nightshade (Four Way Books, 2019), Unfathoming (Four Way Books, 2017),...
-
