Tiana Clark
Visiting Poet
The Kenyon Review described Tiana Clark’s collection I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) as a book that “unearths what many have hoped to obscure and demands recognition for the fact that the echoes of slavery, segregation, and racism are not only in existence, but in fact, maintain our country’s personal and political realities today.” I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Clark’s first book, Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), was selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition.
Clark’s forthcoming collection, Scorched Earth: Poems (Washington Square Press, 2025), delves into a wide array of subjects, from the complexities of divorce to the first Black bachelorette, and the art world. Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon, describes the collection as “wonderfully dangerous,” praising Clark for her fearless exploration of Black womanhood and the poignant mirror world of grief, doubt, and displacement.
In addition to scholarships at Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Frost Place Seminar, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Clark is the winner of the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is the recipient of the 2021–22 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a 2019 Pushcart Prize, and is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Clark is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College and judge of the 19th Annual Poetry Prize for High School Girls.
Clark will read at Leo Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, April 8, 2025 at 7 p.m. A livestream will be available on the BDPC YouTube page.