Aria Aber

Aria Aber is a poet and writer based in Oakland, CA. She was raised in Germany, where she was born to Afghan refugees[1]. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Kenyon Review, and she has received awards and fellowships from Kundiman,[2] the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing,[3] and the Whiting Foundation[4]. Aber was the spring 2020 Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College.[5]

Reception

Hard Damage

Her first full-length collection Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, was published in September 2019 by University of Nebraska Press.[6] In a review at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Claire Schwartz wrote, "Hard Damage — which elaborates a constellation of beauty and terror between Afghanistan, Germany, and the United States — is vexed by the meanings of bringing across." [7] In an interview at The Yale Review, Aber has stated, "Especially the English language is political, because it has operated as a colonizing force in many places around the world, and changed global indigenous languages forever, if not completely eradicated them. If poetry is “the soul of a nation” (this quote is attributed to T.S. Eliot, though I cannot fact-check the source), and our nation is an empire actively participating in displacement and warfare, it feels only natural to me that these topics surface in poetry."[8]

References
  1. "Aria Aber on the Poetry of Exile". The Yale Review. 2020-02-03. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
  2. "Fellows". Kundiman. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
  3. "WI Institute for Creative Writing Fellows". WI Institute for Creative Writing. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
  4. "Aria Aber". www.whiting.org. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
  5. "Contemporary Writers Series | San Francisco Bay Area | Mills College". www.mills.edu. Retrieved 2020-05-22.
  6. "Book Page : Nebraska Press". www.nebraskapress.unl.edu. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
  7. Schwartz, Claire. "On Aria Aber's "Hard Damage"". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
  8. "Aria Aber on the Poetry of Exile". The Yale Review. 2020-02-03. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
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