Tobias Wray
Visiting Poet
Tobias Wray's poetry looks through both historical and personal lenses to examine queer identity, masculinity, and family relationships. Often engaging with LGBTQIA+ history, figures such as Alan Turing and Oscar Wilde appear to speak to the persecution and challenges faced by queer individuals throughout time as Wray explores the construction and deconstruction of masculinity, the importance of chosen family and queer community, and personal transformation through adversity. Pop culture icons like Marilyn Monroe and fairy tale characters such as Snow White appear alongside historical figures, blending the serious and the fantastical to create a poetic voice that is equal parts thought-provoking and playful. Wray's approach is both introspective and outward-looking, using personal experience as a lens through which to examine larger societal issues surrounding gender, sexuality, and identity, while maintaining a sense of wonder and creativity.
His debut poetry collection, No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man, was the winner of the 2020 Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Lighthouse Competition, selected by Randall Mann, who calls these poems “wry luxury items of intelligence, sheathed in the latent double of speech…this is an interrogative, primal, mythic collection, a poetry of privacy and disclosure, of contradiction, a disabused landscape under ‘razor-wire stars.’” Wray’s work has appeared in notable journals like Blackbird, Bellingham Review, and The Georgia Review, as well as in anthologies such as Queer Nature (Autumn House Press, 2022). The recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Wray is an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Oklahoma.
Wray will read at Leo Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, December 3, 2024 at 7 p.m. Livestreams will be available on BDPC Facebook and YouTube pages.