Harriet: News & Community

I was a poet long before I even knew what a critic was. Children may be taught, as I was, to read poems and to write their own, but nobody...

When I set out to write about my mother’s azaleas—the baroque of their annual fuschias, the decadence of their overwrought efflorescence—the azaleas remained unsplendid and sullen. The azaleas refused—or did...

In part two, I explored how lyric poetry transforms the reader by allowing the writer to be in conversation with the world, and how the soundtrack in my book speculation,...

In October 2019, there were shootings in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Long Beach, and Kansas City. Bernie Sanders had a heart attack and Simone Biles won her twenty-first medal at the world...

I Woke Up and it was political I made coffee and the coffee was political I took a shower and the water was.                      ...

In part one, I explored how poetry’s political power lies in its ability to transform the reader, focusing in particular on performance. In this section, I turn my attention to...

In 2020, as one of the judges for the Forward Prizes for Poetry, I was lucky enough to be invited to interview the poet Rachel Long, whose debut collection, My...

Art exists in the space of transformation.                            It lives in our minds and bodies intimately, ready to be called upon in our time of need: whether when we recall...

When my bilingual poetry collection, Boomerang/Bumerán, was published last year, I felt a tremendous sense of gratification at seeing one of its central elements—the use of non-gendered language, particularly in Spanish—recognized, and...

In the pub after a reading, a man comes up to me to tell me how men of his generation (he seems to be in his late twenties/early thirties but...