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What The Universe Is: Kenzie Allen and Tiana Clark

It is an absolute joy for me to be hosting Kenzie and Tiana for the August edition of What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series, as they are poets who make full use of poetry’s ability to engage with complex questions of legacy, identity, and cultural survival, as well as the challenges inherent in transforming oneself to allow for growth, wisdom, and joy. Plus, they’re both absolutely delightful people.

Kenzie Allen is the author of Cloud Missives, forthcoming from Tin House on August 20, 2024. A poet and multimodal artist, she is the recipient of a 92NY Discovery Prize, the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, the 49th Parallel Award, and broadside prizes from Littoral Press and Sundress Publications. Her work can be found in Narrative, POETRY, Poets.org, Boston Review, Best New Poets, and other venues. Born in West Texas, Kenzie currently works at York University in Toronto as an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Literatures and Creative Writing. She is a first-generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. 

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark is the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Clark is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women's studies.

Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

Clark is currently working on her next two books, Begging to be Saved, a memoir-in-essays reckoning with Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art making, and what lies on the other side of survival; and Scorched Earth, a poetry collection, tracing the complexities of relationship beginnings and endings, loneliness, desire, and joy, which sold to Jenny Xu at Atria.

To register for this reading, just go to https://bit.ly/WTUIAug2024.