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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 was “Poetic Lineages.”

Featured Bloggers

    • Safia Elhillo

      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...

    • Headshot of A Van Jordan

      A. Van Jordan is the author of five collections: When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023); The Cineaste (Norton, 2013); Quantum Lyrics (Norton,...

    • Image of Vi Khi Nao

      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...

  • Abstract drawing of meadow, crayon on paper in shades of grey and black.
    Featured Blogger
    By A. Van Jordan December 18, 2023

    Ed Roberson is a master poet. Let’s get that out of the way up front. In his early 80s, he’s 13 books in, and he continues to go strong; if...

  • Abstract painting in with earthy oranges, browns, and yellows, and a smattering of brighter greens and purples.
    Featured Blogger
    By Vi Khi Nao December 11, 2023

    About five or six months ago, I sought a book suggestion from my father. He handed me a Vietnamese edition of Pearl S. Buck’s Trang, which had a distinctive red cover. The...

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  • Featured Blogger
    By Austin Allen October 24, 2022

    Asking how my criticism relates to my poetry is like asking how my obsessions relate to my compulsions. It’s a question I’m much too glad to answer. I like Jhumpa...

    Multi-colored cubist-inspired oil on canvas painting of a clown, blues, greens, reds, oranges.
  • Featured Blogger
    By Timothy Yu October 10, 2022

    I was a poet long before I even knew what a critic was. Children may be taught, as I was, to read poems and to write their own, but nobody...

    geometric shape of a blossom, in aluminum (silvery white)
  • Featured Blogger
    By Alina Stefanescu October 3, 2022

    When I set out to write about my mother’s azaleas—the baroque of their annual fuschias, the decadence of their overwrought efflorescence—the azaleas remained unsplendid and sullen. The azaleas refused—or did...

    abstract painting of red azaleas, red acrylic on white background
  • Featured Blogger
    By Shayla Lawz September 26, 2022

    In part two, I explored how lyric poetry transforms the reader by allowing the writer to be in conversation with the world, and how the soundtrack in my book speculation,...

    Photograph of art installation, two broken white teacups with stains and holes, piled on top of each other, in a saucer.
  • Featured Blogger
    By Achy Obejas September 19, 2022

    In October 2019, there were shootings in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Long Beach, and Kansas City. Bernie Sanders had a heart attack and Simone Biles won her twenty-first medal at the world...

    Photo of protestors in Santiago, one protestor holding large white flag with image of Jara's face, against blue sky.
  • Featured Blogger
    By Kim Moore September 6, 2022

    I Woke Up and it was political I made coffee and the coffee was political I took a shower and the water was.                      ...

    pen and ink illustration with an eerie fairy-tale quality, vague outlines of a lion? a sleeping girl? a tree.
  • Featured Blogger
    By Shayla Lawz August 22, 2022

    In part one, I explored how poetry’s political power lies in its ability to transform the reader, focusing in particular on performance. In this section, I turn my attention to...

    Multicolored geometric shapes (blues browns, blacks, greens) in a composition that, according to the full image description " evokes mirrors placed at different angles, reflecting and refracting chunks of colored light. It is easy to imagine getting lost
  • Featured Blogger
    By Kim Moore August 1, 2022

    In 2020, as one of the judges for the Forward Prizes for Poetry, I was lucky enough to be invited to interview the poet Rachel Long, whose debut collection, My...

    9 square prints with photos  using sign language to say:" We Will No Longer Be Seen and Not Heard." Photos are black and white/sepia toned, range from close up of a face to profile shot of a child, a photo of just two hands, etc.
  • Featured Blogger
    By Shayla Lawz July 25, 2022

    Art exists in the space of transformation.                            It lives in our minds and bodies intimately, ready to be called upon in our time of need: whether when we recall...

    Abstract image of yellow and red light.
  • Featured Blogger
    By Achy Obejas July 11, 2022

    When my bilingual poetry collection, Boomerang/Bumerán, was published last year, I felt a tremendous sense of gratification at seeing one of its central elements—the use of non-gendered language, particularly in Spanish—recognized, and...

    white three dimensional alphabet pieces arranged, in no discernible order, in a square shape, with random alphabet around it, against a black backdrop.
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Previous Bloggers

    • Headshot of poet Aisha Sasha John

      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...

    • Chen Chen

      Chen Chen is the author of the poetry collections Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022), selected as a 2023 notable book by the American Library Association,...

    • Headshot of poet Andrea Cohen

      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),...