Tracy Fuad
Photo by Carleen Coulter
Bio
Tracy Fuad is the author of about:blank, a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the winner of the Donald Hall Prize, published in 2021 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is also the author of the chapbooks PITH, Body of Water 2, and DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD. Her work has been supported with grants, residencies, and fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, the Barbara Deming Fund, Vermont Studio Center, and Callie’s. Her writing has been published and anthologized by POETRY, Best New Poets, the Yale Review, the New Republic,and the Boston Review. A graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program, she lives currently in Berlin with her family, and teaches poetry at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.
Last summer, I was eight months pregnant and researching the etymology of the word worm, the unborn baby’s nickname. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise to learn that worm is a cognate of verse: both stem from the word root wer for turn, or bend, as do the words adverse, converge, worry, and worth. Sometimes, poems require no writing.
To be recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts is an incredible convergence of good fortune. I got the call a few months after the baby was born, still very freshly navigating what it means for me to write and to mother. The shock came along with an enormous sense of relief, and the sense of a way forward. So often I’ve felt I’m working in the dark: unsure whether what I’m writing is of value; uncertain of the path ahead. This grant has already given me more space, energy, and momentum to continue working on my current project, poems which grapple with inheritance and reproduction—of language, of history, of culture—and nascent motherhood in a fragmenting present.
I am immensely honored and awed to be granted this award alongside so many brilliant writers. I feel so lucky to be a poet, and maybe even more so to be a poet among other poets. I’m ever grateful for my peers and teachers and students, whose community, conviviality, support, and shared love for language has been a great source of joy, and who have continually expanded the bounds of my appreciation for poetry. And I hope to keep this vital social fabric at the very heart and center of my practice.