Join Jennifer Franklin & Sophia Bannister as they welcome Tiana Clark, Shanta Lee, and Ruben Quesada, as they read from their new collections!
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection,Scorched Earth (Simon & Schuster, March 5, 2025); 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 book, 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.
Shanta Lee is an award winning artist who works in different mediums as a photographer, curator, writer across genres, and a public intellectual. Her new collection, This Is How They Teach You How to Want It…The Slaughter (Small Harbor Publishing) was published in July 2024. She is the author of the poetry collection,GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions full-length book prize and the 2021 Vermont Book Award. Her collection Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023) was a finalist for the Hudson prize, shortlisted for the Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and longlisted for the Idaho poetry prize. This poetry collection has also inspired a multimedia exhibition at the Newport Art Museum, See Me, Read Me, Hear Me: An Immersion of Black Metamorphoses. Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine, her latest exhibition, has been featured at the Southern Vermont Arts Center and the Fleming Museum of Art. The latest iteration of this exhibition, Dark Goddess: Sacroprofanity (Volume III of the Dark Goddess series) was at the Bennington Museum in 2024.
Ruben Quesada is a poet, translator, and editor. He edited the award-winning anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. His writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Believer, and Harvard Review. His new collection of poetry, Brutal Companion, won the Barrow Street Editors Prize and was published in autumn 2024.
Praise for the books:
“Scorched Earth is quite the title for this stunning volume in which Tiana Clark challenges our notions of just how many times a poem can turn and just how much any poem can hold. Each page reads as if it is hungry for understanding—of divorce, of Blackness, of the American South, of poetry itself: ‘I want to peg/the canon. So I am running back/and forth between the house of silence/and the house of shame…’ Clark’s is an ever evolving voice that we need to hear!” —Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Tradition
“A formally kaleidoscopic work that oscillates between history, family, friendship, love, and the vexed precarity of modern life, Scorched Earth both challenges and soothes at once. But what I love most about these poems, and in Tiana’s poems at large, is the way they name and hold the archive, the barbed histories, the loved ones and the nemeses in our world, with such intelligent tenderness. Here, the ache of lived experience is recast, as it is in our most indelible poems, as sites of wonder and luminosity, where our wounds are—thank god—not merely subjects, but methods.” —Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“What does it mean to be hunted, to be ravaged, to be water they crave to put the fire out in their throats? In her book This is How They Teach You How to Want It . . . The Slaughter, Shanta Lee explores the mercurial world of monsters and prey, of destruction and culpability from the perspective of the hungry / The never fully fed / the . . . come here // closer. In a nightmare world, who can be trusted? Shanta urges the reader to see that predators will maim you with different names / . . . make you use your own hands / to climb onto the butcher’s board. Through deft allusions, precise horror and questions that echo our worst fears, Shanta provides a surreal map of questions and images for making sense of devastation, survivorship and forging ahead in a treacherous world. After all, Some hunger is a taught taut thing / Some hunger demands questions.”
—Joan Kwon Glass, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms (Perugia Press, 2024)
In powerful, incantatory verses, Shanta Lee’s new book, This is How They Teach You How to Want It . . . The Slaughter, brings the metaphor of sacred/profane hunting to bear on the Protean violence of human transformation. This is a book that enacts rather than describes: it casts a spell aiming to release the chthonic power of the living while animating the ethereal aura of the dead. Lee doesn’t just explode boundaries, she sings cadences which bind together the carnivorous and the vulnerable: “the kill who eats, not swallowed.” Lee is an enchanter of reconfiguration, re-solving, by hypnotic utterance, dichotomies between life and death, hunger and consumption, power and helplessness, oppression and liberty. “You hear my bones,” the poet proclaims and whispers. This is a book to hear in our bones too.
—Philip Brady, author of The Elsewhere: Selected Poems and Poetics (Broadstone, 2021)
Ruben Quesada’s Brutal Companion is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read about the fact of longing: “You slowly fade/behind a sugar maple, branches like scarecrows waving goodbye.” And he manages this beauty with a poetry so pure I am always left gagging at even the slightest move and smallest decision in each line (for instance, “above the black milk of Lake Michigan”). These poems are a stunningly melancholic look at love and its eternality. —Jericho Brown
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