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Aria Aber

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aria Aber (born 1991)[1] is a poet and writer based in Los Angeles, California.

Life

Aber was raised in Germany, where she was born to Afghan refugees.[2] Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Kenyon Review.

Aber has received awards and fellowships from Kundiman,[3] the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing,[4] and the Whiting Foundation.[5] Aber was the spring 2020 Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College.[6] She was formerly a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.[7]

Work and publications

Aber’s 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.[8]

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."[9]

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."[2]

Bibliography

Poetry

  • Hard Damage (2019)

References

  1. ^ Cox, Sarah. "$50,000 literary award for Goldsmiths graduate". Goldsmiths, University of London.
  2. ^ a b "Aria Aber on the Poetry of Exile". The Yale Review. 2020-02-03. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
  3. ^ "Fellows". Kundiman. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
  4. ^ "WI Institute for Creative Writing Fellows". WI Institute for Creative Writing. Archived from the original on 2014-01-06. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
  5. ^ "Aria Aber". www.whiting.org. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
  6. ^ "Contemporary Writers Series | San Francisco Bay Area | Mills College". www.mills.edu. Retrieved 2020-05-22.
  7. ^ "Stegner Fellows 2020-2022 | Creative Writing Program". creativewriting.stanford.edu.
  8. ^ "Book Page : Nebraska Press". www.nebraskapress.unl.edu. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
  9. ^ Schwartz, Claire (8 January 2020). "On Aria Aber's "Hard Damage"". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2020-05-19.