Aaron Coleman
Photo by Katherine Simóne Reynolds
Bio
Aaron Coleman is the author of Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018), winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. Coleman has lived and worked with youth in locations including Spain, South Africa, St. Louis, Chicago, and Kalamazoo. He has received fellowships from organizations including the J. William Fulbright Program, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Callaloo, the New York Times, the Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. Coleman is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where his research focuses on the poetics of translation and translation’s role in vivifying relationships between Afrodescendant writers in the hemispheric Americas.
I was working on my laptop in a neighborhood park in Michigan when I answered the phone call I’d dreamed of from the National Endowment of the Arts. As a world beyond my apartment during the pandemic, that park has come to be a sanctuary, remote office, fitness center, and workshop in more ways than I could have known. It’s become an indispensable public space where I’ve weathered what has been, frankly, one of the most difficult years of my life on personal, familial, and professional levels not only because of the pandemic, but also because of the ongoing national and communal crises exacerbated by it. Winning an NEA Literature Fellowship in this year, of all years, is galvanizing fuel to believe in the possibilities of my imagination, to keep pushing and keep going. I keep looking up and slipping into a smile full of gratitude and awe when I think about the utility and the honor of this award in my life. In the final stretch of my PhD, I feel myself entering a crucial phase in the development of my next poetry project: a multigenerational chorus of poems rooted in people and places of my past, exploring the lives of my family and ancestors before, during, and after the Great Migration—and how their legacies live in my body. The NEA Literature Fellowship provides the time and resources I need to take the next leap forward in bringing these Black and American realities, histories, and myths into poetry, into the story of our country and my life.