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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 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 drawing of meadow, crayon on paper in shades of grey and black.
  • 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...

    Abstract painting in with earthy oranges, browns, and yellows, and a smattering of brighter greens and purples.
  • Featured Blogger
    By 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,...

    Collage of fabric, paper, and glue in blues, beiges, golds, greens, mounted on paper.
  • Featured Blogger
    By 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”...

    Ephemeral sculpture in soil of artist's silhouette.
  • Featured Blogger
    By 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,...

    Gelatin silver print featuring up close of ocean waves beneath a cloud-filled sky, with a rectangular shape superimposed on the sky magnifying the clouds and leaving a shadow on the waves.
  • Featured Blogger
    By 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,...

    Watercolor painting of two yellow flowers with long green stems and leaves.
  • Featured Blogger
    By 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...

    Screen print, two overlapping silver circles composed of lines with a sideways reddish diamond in the center, against an orange backdrop.
  • Featured Blogger
    By 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...

    Oil on canvas surrealist painting of a spotted brown snake, its body wound through multiple open books .
  • Featured Blogger
    By 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...

    Square divided into four quadrants, each comprised of color bands, some in straight lines some in curved lines, going in different directions.
  • Featured Blogger
    By 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...

    Black and white photograph captures shadow figures against cement pavement.
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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),...